UTO, Sweden – The last time this notoriously neutral country went to war, Napoleon was on the defensive in France and Britain was preparing to burn Washington.
But the Russian invasion of Ukraine has upset 200 years of global pacifism for the children of the Vikings.
And so it was when the Russian president Vladimir Putin made veiled threats late last month to unleash a nuclear war, The United States was conducting military exercises with Sweden, one of the newest NATO candidates.
As the war raged in Ukraine, hundreds of marines they joined their Swedish counterparts for maneuvers in the Baltic Sea, on and around some of Sweden’s 100,000 mostly uninhabited islands.
In the cold rain and heavy fire, they scrambled up slippery rocks, landed combat boats on the banks, and crawled upside down through wooded ravines.
In the car islandthat Russia invaded in 1719, the US and Swedish Marines spent two weeks firing round after round of artillery as part of their training to ensure that the past does not repeat itself.
The Russians reduced the place to ashes, 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 represent an accelerated course of warfare amphibian, which includes diving in freezing water with heavy equipment and machine guns.
It means learning to be underwater for long periods of time before emerging in a blast of attack machine gun.
“It’s definitely a different kind of environment than Afghanistan or Iraq, where we have a lot of vehicular mobilitySaid Brig. General Andrew Priddy, commander of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade.
From a wet and windy hill on Lilla Skogsskar Island, Priddy kept an eye on US and Swedish marines who stormed the beaches of nearby Stora Skogsskar.
“Being able to operate in this type of environment in the archipelago is extremely important and we like Marine infantrywe have a lot to learn from them, “he said of the Swedes.
This is somewhat new territory for Sweden as well.
The terrain may be familiar, but war is not, not for this generation, not for your parent’s generation, not for the generations of your grandparents or great-grandparents.
The country’s last war was underway 1814, when he liberated Norway from the Danes.
For 200 years, Sweden has kept a non-aligned foreign policy in peacetime and proclaimed itself neutral in wartime.
Sweden avoided World War II, avoiding the German occupation of Norway and the Soviet invasion of the Finns.
During the Cold War, Sweden continued its neutral path.
The country has sent troops to the peacekeeping operations United Nations around the world and even in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks on the United States, but refused to join Born.
And then it happened on February 24, 2022.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine highlighted the limits of being in Europe but not having the security guarantees of NATO’s collective defense pact.
The Finns, dragging the Swedes with them, applied to become members of the alliance.
“Military non-alignment has served Sweden well, but our conclusion is that it will not serve us as well in the future,” the prime minister said at the time. Maddalena Anderson from Sweden.
“This is not a decision to be made lightly.”
Within weeks of the announcement that the two countries wanted to join NATO, the alliance’s military planners were planning demonstrations of force with them, including a series of exercises.
Indeed, while the Marines, most of them from the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force, were in the Swedish archipelago, another group of Marines was practicing the seizure of the island with the Finnish Navy.
“We are sending a Message to most of Russia we have partners, we are training, we are developing our skills and capabilities, ”said Colonel Adam Camel, commander of the 1st Marine Regiment of the Swedish Navy.
“We are united, I would say, and very eager to defend Sweden and this region.”
Attention to the conquest and defense of the islands is crucial, military officials say, because the Baltic sea soon it will be surrounded, with the exception of the Russian Kaliningrad and St. Petersburg, by NATO countries:
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Germany and Denmark, as well as Finland and Sweden.
If the allies approve their membership, both countries should contribute to any blockade NATO might implement at sea in the event of a war with Russia, Pentagon officials say.
The Swedish archipelago would be part of such an effort.
During the exercises, US Marines experimented with a myriad of new ways of waging warfare, drawn from past conflicts in different climates.
In one case, a very different climate.
Perched on top of Lilla Skogsskar, the sergeant. David Swinton, a radio operator in the 2nd Marine Division, checked the controls of a radar he and his platoon mates called. “the system”.
“The system”, essentially a radar Simrad Halo 24 which can be placed on any fishing boat, is available on the commercial market; you can get one at Bass Pro Shops for around $ 3,000.
But over the past year, Swinton and his fellow radio operators have been working on the radar adaptation for use in war maneuvers around the world.
“We figured out how to take this and connect it to the SIPR network,” Swinton explained, referring to computer networks used by the Pentagon to broadcast classified information.
“So we can plug it in there, and anyone in the world can access it and see what we’re sending with this radar.”
It takes five minutes to set it up.
A marine stationed on any of the islands could use radar to send data on Russian ships.
“We are taking things like this to Sweden to show them that you can put four-man squads on one island 100 kilometers from the other, and we can scan the whole island for you and send that information to your naval fleets.” Swinton said.
“You can have complete awareness of what is happening off your coast.”
The idea came, incongruously, from the Houthis in Yemen, the Iranian-backed rebel rebels who for years have plagued a US-backed coalition of Gulf states and govern a swathe of territory in northern Yemen.
The Houthis, who wield a vast arsenal of ballistic and cruise missiles, kamikaze boats and long-range drones, have used radar to follow the ships of the Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
Then the commander general of the 2nd Marine Division, Maj. Gen. Francis Donovan, saw what the Houthis were doing when he led a 5th Fleet amphibious task force operating in the southern Red Sea.
“We were trying to figure out how coalition expeditions were targeting,” Donovan said in an interview. P.
Suddenly he realized that the Houthis were using commercial radars, mounting them on ground vehicles and moving them.
Donovan thought the maneuvers were perfect for mobile and moving Marines.
He challenged his 2nd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion to develop a similar system.
A year later, Swinton and the sergeant major. Joseph Owen, a platoon commander with a tour of Afghanistan behind him, was testing whether the Houthis-inspired radar system would work against Russian ships in the Baltic.
For Sweden, any system capable of detecting events in the archipelago is worth adding to its arsenal, said Rear Admiral Ewa Skoog Haslum, chief of the Swedish navy.
The shallow waters surrounding the islands make it easy Russian submarines hide, he said.
“It is very difficult to have anti-submarine fighters in the archipelago,” Haslum said in an interview in Stockholm.
“You need specific skills.”
No one says the Simrad ship’s radar can detect Russian submarines in the archipelago.
But that, Donovan said, is the beauty of working in an alliance.
“There is not one thing that does everything, but we will provide a means and someone else will take care of other means,” he said.
Russia has no partner right now, he noted.
“Our strength is our allies and partners and the way we bring it all together.”
c.2022 The New York Times Company
Source: Clarin
