Sweden boosts defense spending to handle a ‘wartime situation’
Defense Minister Pål Jonson told POLITICO that a Russian attack "cannot be excluded."
Sweden on Tuesday presented a defense bill that ramps up military spending to 2.4 percent of GDP next year and even higher beyond that — a response to the threat from Russia, Defense Minister Pål Jonson told POLITICO.
“The risk of an attack cannot be excluded,” Jonson said. “Russia is the principal threat to Sweden, and it constitutes a threat to the whole [NATO] alliance.”
“Right now, Russia’s freedom of activity is limited because its ground forces are bogged down in the battlefield [in Ukraine], but we do take note that Russia is willing to take great military and political risks,” he said in a telephone interview.
Defense spending next year will increase by 10 percent — part of a long-term boost.
The country plans additional military spending of 170 billion krona (€15 billion) plus 35.7 billion krona for civil defense through 2030 — coming on top of the existing budget. That will put Sweden’s defense budget at 2.6 percent of GDP by 2028, well above NATO’s target of at least 2 percent.
The higher military and civil defense spending is a return to the 1980s focus on being prepared for anything — as of last year, however, Sweden is a member of NATO while during the standoff with the Soviet Union it was technically neutral.
“We had a strong civil defense in the Cold War,” Jonson said. “After 2015 we reactivated [it], and in this defense bill we put forward the necessary economic means to make it credible.”
The target, he said, is to enable Swedes to handle a “wartime situation.”
Making sure that Sweden, with its nearly 3,300 kilometers of coastline and sparsely populated Arctic regions, isn’t an “attractive target” for Moscow means bolstering everything from the country’s power and transport networks to its healthcare and financial systems, Jonson said.
“Civil and military defense are two sides of the same coin,” he said.
On the military end, cash is being funneled into everything from armored vehicles to a new coastal missile capability, rocket artillery, three S106 Globaleye reconnaissance planes, Black Hawk HK16 utility helicopters and the latest Saab-built Gripen 39E fighter jets.
Five Visby-class corvettes will be upgraded, while the navy will buy three Luleå-class surface combat vessels.
The number of annual conscripts will increase to 10,000 by 2030, and the overall size of the military will grow by some 27,000 men and women to around 115,000. Four new brigades will be in place by 2030.
“There were decades of underinvestment,” Jonson said. “The burden-sharing has to become more equalized between America and Europe.”
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