It was a huge honour to get the call when the people over at FOI decided they needed an external contributor to describe Swedish military capabilities for their “Western Military Capability in Northern Europe 2023”, in particular as their two previous instalments of the report have set a high bar.

The report (Report No. FOI-R–5527–SE, ISSN 1650-1942) examines twelve key Western nations, covering security and defence policy, military expenditures, armed forces structure, current operational military capability, and the development of military capability up to 2030. The selection of the twelve countries – Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, France, United Kingdom, and the United States – is based on their importance to the collective defence of Northern Europe, as mentioned with my responsibility as the sole external contributor being to write the chapter on Sweden. This report is part of the broader study by FOI aiming for a comprehensive analysis of the military strategic situation in Northern Europe, with further parts coming on a later date.

Compared to earlier editions, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine obviously has affected the field in a number of ways, and these are also looked at in the report – including the direct effect of delivering weapons and systems from active inventories of the armed forces studied.

My contribution has by more or less any standard measured been the largest work to date I have been involved in, and it has been a real learning experience for me personally. I cannot thank everyone who in different ways have assisted me along the way enough. These thanks belong in particular to the editors – Björn Ottosson and Krister Pallin – who showed great understanding and patience when dealing with my somewhat unconventional working schedule (in hindsight, setting up a conference call while on a road trip with my brother and a common friend might not have been my brightest idea…) and from whom I learned a lot about managing projects of this scope. I obviously also want to thank the people who have been commenting on my drafts and answering my questions, you know who you are! A particular shout-out also to Maria Ädel, without whom the chapter on expenditures would have been a mess of Excel-sheets and me trying to make sense of Swedish budgetary procedures.

Writing about an issue such as this, where it feels like any and all plans are constantly changing, had its challenges. However, it is with great joy I can say that the final version of a sentence that seemingly changed for each draft is “After a long wait, Sweden achieved ratification by all member states in February 2024”. After over two centuries apart, we stand together once more.