Second Line of Defense had an interview with CEO of Risk Intelligence Hans Tino Hansen on the challenges and opportunities for restructuring Northern European defense associated with the addition of Finland and Sweden to NATO.

5 December 2022

The article starts with Risk Intelligence’s CEO describing the Northern European defense area as one large continuous region. Therefore, he explains how it extends from North America across the North Atlantic and the Artic alongside the Nordic countries, further down into the Baltic. More, he elaborates on the “three clusters of dense problems” within the region:

• the first one covers the North Atlantic area, and the challenges around it related to the gap between Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom;

• the second one looks at the High North security and defense area and how Sweden and Finalnd’s entrance into NATO will increase the collaboration there;

• the third one focuses on the Baltic Sea region and the opportunity for “innovation“.

Furthermore, when talking about the Baltic Sea, Hans Tino Hansen said '“Even in this area there are distinctive differences in the tasks with Norway, Finland, Poland and the three Baltic republics being frontline states.'' He further noted “This leaves the other Nordic states with the important task to take part in the defense of these states along with Germany and Poland as well as UK and USA as well as delivering Host Nation Support to reinforcements travelling through their territory.”

Additionally, Hans Tino Hansen said that the “current NATO command structure has been built for another time, which was a time of “peace dividend” with reductions of NATO structures, and engagement in out of area operations.” He further added that “The chiefs of defense of the four Nordic nations have argued for a command structure in NATO, where the region is subordinated to one command and not to two, JFC Norfolk and JFC Brunsum.”

Moreover, he claimed that “the creation of a new JFC command for the northern region like AFNORTH during the Cold War will be a strong driver in the process of integrating Finnish and Swedish defense with existing member NATO countries in the region.” Further, Hansen stated that “Taking into consideration, the size of the combined planned forces in all domains in the region as well as potential reinforcements to the region, it may be more than challenging to handle and develop this with the existing NATO command structure.”

Read the full article here.

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