October 19, 2026: Sweden is spending over five billion dollars to have a French defense contractor build four 4,500-ton Lulea-class frigates. The first won’t be delivered until 2030, and the second in 2035.

This comes in the wake of Sweden’s 2024 decision to join NATO because of the war in Ukraine. With these four new frigates, the Royal Swedish Navy’s normal role of defending coastal waters will escalate to operations in the Baltic, North Sea, and High North. The four ships will be named Luleå, Norrköping, Trelleborg, and Halmstad

The Luleå class is based on the French FDI (Frégate de Défense et d’Intervention) design. These ships are 122   meters long, with two diesel engines and four more powerful gas turbine engines, providing a max speed of 48 kilometers an hour and a range of 9,000 kilometers at a cruising speed of 27 kilometers an hour. The crew of 225, plus up to 28 specialists, commandos or whatever, operates the usual air, surface, and subsurface sensors, along with fire-control systems.

Weapons include up to three 8-cell VLS cells with anti-aircraft missiles with a range of 150 kilometers, and 24 CAMM ER anti-aircraft missiles with a range of 45 kilometers. It also has two four-cell Gungnir anti-ship missile launchers and three anti-submarine torpedoes. It has one 57mm and one 40mm gun, operated remotely from inside the ship. It also has electronic countermeasures and anti-missile decoys.

A decade ago, because of a military budget cutback and a sharp reduction in the number of young men conscripted each year, the Swedish military had to take extraordinary measures to get enough men to volunteer and provide adequate defense against the growing Russian threat. This came to light recently when an army recruiting team drove a CV90 armored vehicle into a supermarket parking lot on the island of Gotland to recruit enough locals to staff a new defense force for Gotland. The island once had a military garrison, but Sweden eliminated it in the 1990s as it dismantled its substantial Cold War-era defense forces.

Gotland is the largest (at 3,200 square kilometers) of many Swedish islands in the Baltic Sea. It had long been a key military target for any invaders, be they from Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is gone, but Russia is once again a threat, and parliament authorized a Gotland defense force consisting of a 168-man infantry company and a 70-man tank company. The infantry would be full-time soldiers, while the tank company would be manned by reservists (part-time soldiers). This small garrison is meant to make it impossible for the Russians to take control of Gotland quickly and without loss. The island has a population of 57,000, and during World War II and the Cold War, that meant over 4,000 local reservists were armed and organized to deal with any attack. Times have changed, and now the army must do some energetic recruiting to get less than 200 local men to volunteer.

The Swedish CV90 Infantry Fighting Vehicle (IFV) was an impressive prop. This 22-ton tracked vehicle has a three-person crew and room for eight passengers (usually infantrymen). The vehicle's turret carries a 40mm autocannon and a coaxial 7.62mm machine gun, plus a thermal imager for night operations.

Sweden needed the CV90 in Gotland because, by 2015, Swedish politicians agreed with their generals and admirals that over two decades of military reductions had left the country unable to do much about any aggressive Russian moves. This even though the Russian armed forces have been reduced 80 percent since 1991. That was still a million troops, while by 2016 Sweden had only 38,000 troops available. This includes 5,600 full-time workers, 10,500 reservists, and 22,000 Home Guard. Most troops, namely the Home Guard, are another form of reserve, but instead of reinforcing full-time troops in wartime, the Home Guard is organized into 70 infantry battalions (each with 2-5 companies) assigned to the areas where their part-time soldiers work and live. Created in 1940, the Home Guard relies on volunteers who are either former full-time personnel or reservists with at least three months of basic training, and who attend two four-day training exercises a year to practice mobilization and perform their wartime duties. In addition, most Home Guard companies (about 70 troops each) hold weekend training sessions ten times a year. The Home Guard take their training and readiness very seriously, especially when an obvious threat looms. In 1940 it was the Germans, but after 1945 it was the Russians, at least until 1991. Now the Russians are once more a threat.

After 2010, Sweden phased out mandatory conscription. But now opinion polls show that over 70 percent of Swedes wanted conscription revived. As a result of this shift in public opinion, the government is looking into how to do that. It won’t be the old type of conscription that took nearly all men who were physically, mentally, and psychologically able, but a form of conscription that, while seen as fair, did not take everyone. In particular, the new type of conscription aims to recruit the specialists the military needs but currently lacks. That means men who are experts in various types of electronics and software, as well as medical and other unique skills the armed forces need