UTO, Sweden – When this supposedly neutral country last went to war, Napoleon was on a war footing in France and Britain was preparing to burn Washington.
But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine upended 200 years of global pacifism for the children of the Vikings.
And so it was that when Russian President Vladimir V. Putin issued veiled threats late last month to start a nuclear war, the United States was holding military exercises with Sweden, one of the strongest candidates. recently at NATO.
As war raged in Ukraine, hundreds of Marines joined their Swedish counterparts for maneuvers in the Baltic Sea, on and around some of Sweden’s 100,000 mostly uninhabited islands. In cold rain and heavy fire, they scaled slippery rocks, landed from battle boats on the banks, and crawled on their bellies through wooded ravines.
On the island of Uto, invaded by Russia in 1719, US and Swedish navies spent two weeks firing round after round of artillery as part of their training to ensure the past was not repeated . (The Russians burned the place down, leaving only a church tower in a village.)
For Americans, this is somewhat new territory. After 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the maneuvers required for combat in the Baltic Sea represent a crash course in amphibious warfare, including diving into freezing waters while carrying heavy equipment and carrying machine guns. This means learning to stay underwater for long periods of time before emerging in a flurry of offensive machine guns.
“It’s definitely a different type of environment than Afghanistan or Iraq, where we’re very mobile,” Brig. Gen. Andrew T. Priddy, commander of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade.
From a wet and windy hill on the island of Lilla Skogsskar, General Priddy watched as the US and Swedish marines stormed the beaches of nearby Stora Skogsskar.
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“Being able to operate in this type of environment in the archipelago is extremely important, and we as the Marine Corps have a lot to learn from them,” he said of the Swedes.
It is also somewhat new territory for Sweden. The terrain may be familiar, but the war is not – not for this generation, not for their parents’ generation, not for the generations of their grandparents or great-grandparents. The country’s last war was in 1814, when it detached Norway from the Danes. For 200 years, Sweden maintained a non-aligned foreign policy in times of peace and declared itself neutral in times of war.
Sweden avoided World War II, sparing itself the German occupation suffered by Norway and the Soviet invasion suffered by the Finns. During the Cold War, Sweden continued on its neutral path. The country sent troops to United Nations peacekeeping operations around the world, and even to Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks in the United States, but refused to join NATO.
And then February 24, 2022 arrived. The Russian invasion of Ukraine highlighted the limitations of being in Europe but not having the security guarantees of NATO’s collective defense pact. The Finns – dragging the Swedes with them – asked to join the alliance.
“Military non-alignment has served Sweden well, but our conclusion is that it will not serve us as well in the future,” Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson of Sweden said at the time. “This is not a decision to be taken lightly.”
Within weeks of the announcement of the two countries joining NATO, the alliance’s military planners were planning shows of force with them, including a host of exercises.
In fact, while the Marines, mostly from the Second Marine Expeditionary Force, were in the Swedish Archipelago, another group of Marines were practicing island seizures with the Finnish Navy.
“We are sending a message to Russia mainly, that we have partners, we are training, we are building our capabilities and capabilities,” said Colonel Adam Camel, commander of the Swedish Navy’s 1st Marine Regiment. “We are united, I would say, and very keen to defend Sweden, as well as this region.”
The focus on capturing and defending the islands is crucial, military officials say, as the Baltic Sea will soon be surrounded, except for Kaliningrad and St. Petersburg, by NATO countries: Estonia, Latvia , Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Denmark – plus Finland and Sweden. If the allies approve their membership, the two countries would have to contribute to any chokeholds NATO might put in place at sea in the event of a war with Russia, Pentagon officials said.
The Swedish archipelago would be part of such an enterprise.
During the exercises, U.S. Marines experienced a host of new ways of waging war, drawn from past conflicts in different climates.
In one case, a very different climate.
Perched atop Lilla Skogsskar, Sgt. David Swinton, a radio operator with the Second Marine Division, checked the controls of a radar he and his platoon mates called “the system.”
“The system”, essentially a Simrad Halo 24 radar that can be installed on any fishing boat, is readily available on the commercial market – you can get one at Bass Pro Shops for around $3,000. But for the past year, Sergeant Swinton and his fellow radio operators have been working on adapting the radar for use in warfare maneuvers around the world.
“We figured out how to take that and tie it to the SIPR network,” Sergeant Swinton explained, in a reference to computer networks used by the Pentagon to transmit classified information. “So we can tie it in there, and anybody in the world can come up and see what we’re sending with that radar.”
It takes five minutes to set up. A marine stationed on one of the islands could use the radar to send back data on Russian ships.
“We bring stuff like this to Sweden to show them that you can put four-man teams on an island 60 miles from another, and we can scan the whole island for you and relay that information to your naval fleets “, said Sergeant Swinton. “You can have complete knowledge of what is happening on your coastline.”
The idea came, incongruously, from the Houthis in Yemen, the scrappy Iran-backed rebels who for years tormented a US-backed coalition of Gulf states that govern a swathe of territory in northern Yemen. The Houthis, who wield a vast arsenal of cruise and ballistic missiles, suicide boats and long-range drones, have used the radars to track Emirati and Saudi ships.
Then the Commanding General of the Second Marine Division, Maj. Gen. Francis L. Donovan, saw what the Houthis were up to when he led a Fifth Fleet. amphibious task force operating in the southern Red Sea.
“We were trying to figure out how they were targeting coalition ships,” Gen. Donovan said in an interview. Soon he realized that the Houthis were using standard radars, mounting them on vehicles on the shore and moving them around.
General Donovan thought the maneuvers were perfect for mobile, on-the-go Marines. He challenged his second light armored reconnaissance battalion to develop a similar system.
A year later, Sergeant Swinton and Master Sgt. Joseph Owen, a platoon commander with a tour of Afghanistan under his belt, was testing whether the Houthi-inspired radar system would work against Russian ships in the Baltics.
For Sweden, any system capable of detecting events in the archipelago deserves to be integrated into its arsenal, said Rear Admiral Ewa Skoog Haslum, head of the Swedish Navy. The shallow waters around the islands make it easy for Russian submarines to hide, she said.
“It is very difficult to have anti-submarine warfare in the archipelago,” Admiral Haslum said in an interview in Stockholm. “You need specific abilities.”
Nobody says that the Simrad ship’s radar can detect Russian submarines in the archipelago. But that, said General Donovan, is the beauty of working in an alliance.
“There is no one thing that does everything, but we will provide support, and someone else will take care of the other supports,” he said.
Russia has no partners at the moment, he noted. “Our strength lies in our allies and our partners, and how we bring it all together.”