For the 20th time stakeholders within Finnish maritime defence have gathered to discuss current events and trends in the field, and as usual there was lot to talk about.

The elephant in the room was obviously COVID-19. Not only has it affected the Navy, but it struck at a time when major changes to how voluntary defence exercises are organised was just being rolled out. For the Navy, while the creation of bubbles within the regular conscript training has been the most talked about move, the force has been doing quite a bit more. The key was identifying which are the capabilities that are absolutely crucial to maintain at any given time, and ensuring that these are kept running (lets face it: the FDF could survive a short break in the training of conscripts without any major long-term issues, but the fleet needs to be combat capable and able to sail 24/7 to ensure the integrity of Finnish waters). I leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out what this might have entailed in practice.

The headline message was that things have worked out. “The Navy is extremely flexible”, as it was expressed, and everyone from the top down to the individual conscripts have understood the size of the challenge, and embraced it. An interesting detail is that the polling of the conscripts transferring to reserve actually shows higher grades when evaluating their services compared to earlier years, a trend visible both in the Navy as well as in the FDF as a whole.

However, even in the midst of the pandemic the sight is set on the future. The leadership of the Navy has taken a number of steps to ensure that the Navy maintains its combat capability and ability to perform the missions it has received into the coming decades. At the core of everything is the missions – anything that does not advance the missions won’t be accepted under the current leadership. This goes for both training as well as developing doctrines fit for the battlefield of the future as well as for the equipment the Navy will bring to it. As an obvious example, the new Gabriel V (PTO 2020) won’t just be a drop-in replacement to the RBS 15 (MTO 85M), as the capabilities of the new missiles are significantly improved and dictates changes to the tactics and concepts of operations to get the best effect out of it. The goal is that in 2032 the Navy will fight according to four core principles:

• A good situational picture, with both the tools used to create it and the command structure employing it able to withstand the demands of combat,
• Decentralised operations, with concentrated effect,
• Mobile operational forces with great firepower and well-trained local forces, both of which are able to withstand the demands of combat,
• National and international connectivity allowing for common operations.

None of these ideas are exactly new, but on the other hand there isn’t a need to reinvent the wheel. What is new is the realisation that all services – including the Navy – will need organic capability to take the fight to all domains, including not only the traditional three of air, land, sea, but also the information domain and cyber. Another is connecting the Arctic to the Baltic Sea as one operational theatre, in which anything that happens in one will reflect upon the other.

The aggressive attitude present in the principles above are also expressed in the Navy’s desire to maintain the initiative through an active conduct on the battlefield, ensuring that the Navy stays proactive instead of reactive and gets the most out of its resources. This obviously require a highly trained force, and one of the key questions is how to ensure that the force gets an inflow of competent and motivated personnel and conscripts. The challenge is in part a common issue for the FDF as a whole as the number of suitable conscripts is in decline as part of more general societal trends, but the Navy has a special twist to it as it in large parts of the country the least-known of the services.

Which in turn means you have to make sure that the ones you get become – and stay – top-notch.

As the Finnish Naval Reserve and the Navy co-host the event, much of the focus was obviously on the reserve component. The Navy expects the field of reserve organisations to play a key part in ensuring that the capacity of the individual reservists are upheld, and not only in the physical sense, but as important is maintaining the mental and ethical game. Side-note: while FDF has talked about the importance of the first two a number of times, it is refreshing to see the Navy stating the importance of ethical behaviour by their soldiers and sailors, as recent events have shown that even amongst some of the world’s most elite forces when you promote an aggressive can-do attitude and a willingness to take initiative and judge the situation out in the field – extremely valuable traits in any combat unit – there comes a very real risk of not just pushing up to the line, but actually stepping over it.

The other side of what the Navy expects help with is:

Maintaining a naval espirit the corps and a healthy pride

Which sounds jolly nice.

The plan is also to develop further the local forces and their provincial components, to get these further involved in the everyday action as well as in the strategic signalling (the ability to send messages through a show of force without causing an escalation was by the way also mentioned as a crucial capability, and one that places high demands on the flexibility of the naval capabilities and a political willingness to employ these). To allow for this and ensure a motivated reserve force a number of steps are being taken to create interesting positions for reservists within the naval force structure and creating associated training programs to ensure that the know-how continues to grow within the reserve. This include for example looking into the ability to open up training events scheduled for full-time personnel also to reservists. Much of this, like the mantra of being better at taking into account the “civilian” knowledge of the reserve, are things that have been discussed for years, but I did leave the seminar with a feeling that it might indeed be different this time around and that things are really moving forward.

A year has passed, and for the 19th time the Finnish Navy and Naval Reserve invited a number of stakeholders to come together and discuss all matters related to questions of maritime defence. This year over 80 persons met up at the Naval Academy in Suomenlinna on a rainy Saturday to ponder over questions such as the current state and the future of both the professional and reserve parts of Finnish naval defences, what’s the deal with Russia, and whether the security situation in the Baltic Sea region really has deteriorated?

The answer to the last question was easy, at least if one compare to the post-Cold War world of the 90’s or early 00’s – yes, we are worse off than we were back then. At the same time, ensuring security of supply has never been more important. The answer to this multifaceted challenge is the Pohjanmaa-class, which together with the completely revamped Hamina-class provide the Navy with the ability to operate in two directions simultaneously, and also represents something of the sought after baseline when shipowners judge if they can take the risk of sending their merchant vessels into a high-risk region.

If the Maritime Defence Day earlier years have seen significant discussion on ongoing and upcoming vessel and equipment projects, these were relegated to a secondary role this year. There was a general feeling in the air that the question of “what” has been at least partly solved with the signing of the Pohjanmaa-class contracts and the roll-out of FNS Tornio, and with laws and doctrines providing the “why”, the focus is now on the “how”. The scope of the modernisation the Navy will undergo over the next few years is significant, with e.g. the PTO 2020 (Gabriel) providing a significant increase in capability over the current MTO 85M (RBS 15), and it is clear that the Navy will have to change their ways of operating to get the full benefit of their new capabilities. However, this is not only the case for the individual systems, but the change is even more radical when zooming out and looking at the capabilities on a vessel- or squadron-level. Importantly, the question was raised if the officer corps in general, and the cadets about to enter training in particular, will receive training for the world as it looks today or for the battlefield of 2030? The obvious answer is that there is a need to prepare for the future, but unlearning old habits that once held true but have now turned if not obsolete then at least suboptimal can prove difficult. In the end, all involved need to look themselves in the mirror and ask if they really are preparing for the crisis of tomorrow, or if they just keep doing what they have always done while cruising forward on autopilot.

Coming from the corporate world, I could not help but feel like the concept of Lean is entering the Navy. The Navy has a clear-cut mission, the surveillance of our waters, repelling territorial violations and maritime attacks, and protecting sea lines of communication. Anything that isn’t related to this core mission is a waste of time and precious resources, and this thinking needs to cascade down throughout not only the Navy but the reserve organisations as well. The operational planning needs to drive readiness planning, which in turn needs to drive the plans for unit production, which in turn dictates the exercises held. Gone are the days of voluntary reservists just “going somewhere and doing something”. This also need to take into account local and regional differences, as well as differences between units. If we train the same way in the southern border region as we do in the Archipelago Sea or in the Gulf of Bothnia, we are likely doing something wrong.

However, while there obviously is waste (to use lean-terminology), there is also much that is good in the system. This includes both the grassroots operations of the L-series of boats by the Naval Reserve and the National Defence Training Association, as well as the high-level refresher exercises. The evacuation of ‘wounded’ by the reservists of the Nyland Brigade was described as an example of the latter, with the scenario apparently running in accordance with the real deal all the way from the battlefield to the field hospital, with the exception of the surgeon not starting to cut into the simulated casualty. “You might imagine the surprise of the wounded when they were asked for permission to practice application of intravenous lines, and in the cases where this was granted they quickly where hooked up to peripheral lines in both hands before they were carried aboard the vessel that took them to the field hospital.” Being married to a physician, I can sympathise (though I’ve never actually had IV-lines)…

But what about Russia? Russia is the driver behind much of the instability in the Baltic Sea region. Much of this is apparently driven not only by a desire to recreate any historical grandness or regain superpower status (the latter of which Putin actually has more or less succeeded with despite the poor hand he was dealt), but also by a desire to maintain freedom to maneuver by effectively blocking Western attempts at boxing in Russia (i.e. getting Russia to adhere to international rules and human rights). This takes many forms, including wars in the information and cyber spaces, and relies heavily on the ability of the authoritarian state to take rapid ad hoc-actions to maintain the initiative. The west has tried to answer, but it is unclear to what extent the deterrence work bears fruit, especially as strong political voices are calling for appeasement.

The Baltic Sea is the new divided Germany

With the liberation of Central and Eastern Europe from the Soviet Union, the Baltic Sea region has become the fault line and a stage for provocations. This include issues such as the harassment of merchant shipping, further highlighting the potential vulnerabilities of the supply lines traversing the narrow sea. With the three Baltic countries safely inside NATO, there is always a risk that the countries in the grey zone, Finland and Sweden, will have to provide the real estate for a more or less serious Russian provocation. This naturally raises uncomfortable questions, including the role of the major islands in the Baltic Sea, as well as the vulnerability of the sea-based trade to different kinds of hybrid actions. The issue with Gotland-scenarios (either at Gotland or at another location such as Bornholm or the Åland Islands) have been discussed at great length elsewhere, but suffice to say they can play both a political role as well as provide additional range for the somewhat overhyped Russian A2/AD-bubble (yes, everyone’s favourite FOI-report was mentioned).

For the hybrid scenarios, an emphasis was placed on the use of the market forces to deal serious damage to a country’s maritime infrastructure. Granted you can sink a small freighter in a suitably narrow strategic sea lane, but you can also simply pay the vessels to go somewhere else. If there’s a market demand that pays better than sending your vessels to the Baltic Sea, suddenly the Finnish waters might face a serious shortage of tonnage, even if the supply lines notionally stays open. Globalised ownership patterns also makes questions such as how many vessels fly Finnish flags largely irrelevant, as a foreign owner might quickly change flag if it is felt that operating under Finnish rules might be less than optimal. A similar issue can be seen when it comes to port infrastructure, where key pieces of equipment (including large systems such as cranes), can be owned by stevedoring companies and not the port itself. With these companies then possibly being under international ownership and able to ship out their machinery in a matter of days if they feel they can get more money somewhere else, ownership of the port itself can quickly become a secondary question if the “port” turns out to be just a plot of land with quays and empty warehouses, void of any loading/unloading equipment. In short, cash is still king, and the invisible hand is susceptible to bribery.

However, while a crisis below the threshold of war is the more likely scenario if tensions were to flare up in the Baltic Sea region, a full-scale war in the Baltic cannot be ruled out. In that case Sweden would be involved due to it’s strategic location right on the US reinforcement route to the Baltic states. The Finnish situation is less certain, as while Finland sees the 1,300 km border with Russia largely as a liability from a defence point of view, the same is likely the case for Russia, with Kremlin’s appetite for having to divert forces to conduct offensive operations (or even just to hold the line) north of the Gulf of Finland likely being limited. On the other hand, wars have a tendency to escalate according to their own logic, and it is safe to say that a large conflict in the region would have a seriously deteriorating effect on Finnish national security, regardless of whether Finland would be able to stay out of the firing line or not (it can even be argued that trying to stay out of the firing line at any cost might be suboptimal in certain cases). For the Navy, being prepared for all contingencies is paramount, and this is something that clearly is top of mind of the service. Currently the situation is described as “satisfactory”, and with the equipment now being acquired and training being adjusted to meet the demands of the future, it seems set to continue that way.