Now operating within the NATO alliance rather than as the military of a neutral country, the Swedish armed forces are in the process of transforming their doctrine and force structure to confront a new set of imperatives.

In a briefing on 5 May 2026 hosted at Saab’s facilities in Karlskrona the Swedish armed forces’ Chief of Army, Major General Jonny Lindfors, outlined the requirements for Sweden’s ‘next army’ and the challenges that come with that.

Most immediately, of course, Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine – the event that ultimately pushed Sweden – and Finland – into the NATO fold, has left the Swedish Army short of equipment.

“We are really, really trying to prepare as much as we can on backfill and stockpiles because we, as all the other nations, are still suffering from the peace dividend,” the general noted. “We donated a lot of equipment and supplies to Ukraine. We’ve shifted that to production for Ukraine now, but it’s still a backfill to be where I want to be.”

Outlining the Swedish armed forces’ strategic objectives, which have included its role as a new member of NATO since March 2024, Gen Lindfors summarised them as follows: “We need to be able to protect the security of supply to the Scandinavian Peninsula, or at least contribute to it; we need to be able to support Central Europe in deterrence and defence in that venue; be able to contribute heavily to defence in northern Finland and the Baltic states; and contribute to offensive operations, if it becomes necessary, in relation to Russia. So that’s the overall concept.

Regarding his particular role as the army chief, Gen Lindfors said he needed to ensure the protection of hubs and nodes of transport in Sweden, given that it is assumed that Sweden would be area of transit and sustainment for operations further east.

“We need to ensure mobility, air defence, wet gap crossing capabilities and so on. Sweden is a very long country, but it’s also cut by rivers in a number of places, so wet gap crossing is something that we are concerned about.”

Gen Lindfors referred to the island of Gotland, which lies in the Baltic Sea off Sweden’s southeastern coast, as “our own front line [that] we care extra for and see as the place where we want to actually project power into the Baltic Sea as well and set up our own A2/AD [anti-access/area denial] bubble.”

The general also noted being able to operate in Latvia, where since February 2025 the Swedish Army has a permanent presence as a key member of NATO’s Multinational Brigade Latvia, as a requirement, along with Swedish forces making a “heavy investment in the land corridor up north, supporting Finland and Norway along the Russian border, where we are also planning for an armed forces contribution”.

This new set of requirements “resets how we used to think”, the general noted, “because we normally built an army and planned an army … to operate on Swedish soil, protecting the Swedish border”.

“We have a fairly small army; we’re about 60,000 troops. You have the Home Guard in addition to that, with about 20-25,000 troops, and I’m tasked to set up four brigades, one battlegroup on the island of Gotland and one division headquarters.

Looking at strategic imperatives in a potential conflict with Russia, Gen Lindfors said, “The framework I see for me as a driver in the need for transformation is looking at ourselves as a ‘rear’ area.” The ‘close’ fight in such a scenario would probably happen along NATO’s eastern border with Russia, the general explained, while Russia itself would constitute the ‘deep’ part of the theatre of operations.

Thus, the Swedish armed forces doctrine and force structure now stress the need to facilitate contributions to large-scale operations in the Baltic states and Finland while also maintaining host-nation support and transiting in the rear.

There is, however, another imperative.

“I think the million dollar question is ‘How do we posture ourselves for a credible, credible deterrent to Russia?’, and an even trickier question, ‘How do we fight and win outnumbered?’ Because we will be outnumbered,” Gen Lindfors warned. “The population of Sweden is 10 million people, Finland’s five million people, and Russia is a lot larger, and there’s their willingness to take risk, to just put more people into the fight. It’s something that we would have a hard time to sustain, meaning we’ll have to find another way to fight.”

“Looking at it the other way, from the Russian perspective, we’re the ‘deep’,” the general added. “We are the place where Russia most likely wants to interrupt, disturb NATO forces from sustaining, from industrial capacity, from basing, and operating from.”

In terms of potential Russian offensive operations, Gen Lindfors said he did not envisage a large land operation in Sweden, with the possible exception of a land grab on Gotland or a limited operation in the High North with special forces. Instead, he assumes that, as well as being targeted by the kind of destabilisation operations on which Russia is already embarking against NATO nations across its border, Sweden would be subjected to long-range precision strikes and perhaps even other launched effects similar to the drone-based Ukrainian Operation Spider’s Web against Russian airfields on 1 June 2025.

“For counter-UAS [counter-unmanned aerial system operations] it’s going to be a big task to manage over the whole surface of Sweden,” he noted, while adding, “We’re an island, more or less, when it comes to sustainment, so naval operations will also be really important for the army, not only from a sustainment standpoint but actually looking at the Straits of Denmark and protecting the harbours.”

Gen Lindfors emphasised that the Swedish armed forces “cannot get tricked into a war of attrition with Russia on equal settings”. Instead, the future Swedish Army “has to be cheap enough to sustain in a war of attrition. We cannot build an army that can fight one time or for 24 hours [and then] all our money is spent because, so far, most of the wars have not succeeded in a timely manner. It’s always come to a war of attrition or very limited operation, and we’re not going to be the ones who decide if it’s a limited operation. So we have to prepare for a war of attrition, and then we need to be able to afford it.

“We also need to build an army, a culture in the army, and a network, an ecosystem, that helps us to fight and win the ‘innowar’, the innovation war, by creating adaptive velocity advantage.”

Explaining this concept further, Gen Lindfors said, “To my belief we actually can create an advantage by adapting quicker, because what we’re seeing today is pace of change and the fact that it’s actually tempo that is the master of perfection in all operations. Good enough in time is so much better than perfect. An optimised system will only be optimised for a couple of weeks; then the surroundings change, so being able to realise that an advantage will be temporary. The advantage will be short: it’s not going to be years, it’s going to be months and weeks. And what works today will not work in a couple of months because tactics or technology will change. Thinking of that, to me the pace of change and the adaptive velocity will be a [vital]. If we can act quicker, together with industry, and keep the long-run lines running, keep the masses and the traditional legacy systems just working, but also have a quick pace of change always operating on the unit level, you know, in a manner that’s quicker than Russia.”

The general noted, however, that there will be bottlenecks to overcome: firstly, there will be a selection bottleneck, where Swedish defence procurement will only be able to rapidly proceed with a select number of procurements rather a whole host of them, and will also have to be able to ‘fail fast’; secondly, there will be a conversion bottleneck, as successful procurements have to be scaled up to create combat mass.

“We need to start working in a way we actually did 30 or 40 years ago,” said Gen Lindfors. “When we developed the Gripen fighters, the CV90s [infantry fighting vehicles], the anti-tank weapons we operate now, that was done by soldiers working very close to engineers and academia. And that’s the way we’re trying to restart our co-operation with Saab and other businesses and universities.

“So what we do, for example, now during exercises you will find reserve officers with a special purpose, especially selected for their position in the industry, with the task of looking at us with their eyes and finding our problems from their perspective – because when I see my problems, it’s from a biased way, confined by my experiences; I will not see how to create the next advantage.

“So we’re trying to do that with our reserve officers,” the general concluded. “We’re trying to pull from the fact that we have a conscript system, where our part-time professional soldiers will have a day job somewhere else, and also inviting industry and academia to participate in exercises.”

In a Q&A session following Gen Lindfors’ presentation, Warsight asked him whether there have been any challenges for the Swedish armed forces in becoming a fully fledged NATO military as opposed to operating alongside forces of the alliance as in the past.

“At a lower tactical/operational level, joining NATO was kind of business as usual,” the general replied, “because we’ve been in the operations with KFOR [Kosovo Force] NMI [NATO Mission Iraq], ISAF [the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan]. We’ve been in pretty much every NATO military operation that’s come along since the early 2000s, so when it comes to personal relations, the way you actually run daily business, it’s pretty similar.

“I think the major shift has been understanding the capability targets, understanding how to go after the military requirements, minimum capability requirements, but most of all how to, as a new member, actually provide input and be a partner of how to influence NATO in in a way that suits Sweden, and I’m just getting into the political guidance, how that will affect the next set of capability targets and so on,” the general said.

“As I said, we need an army we can afford, that we can sustain. Everyone is spending a lot more money, but everyone will also realise really quickly that if we’re trying to replicate the very high-end equipment that US have provided into the theatre, we will not be able to sustain it. So we will need to find out a way to fight and win against Russia, outnumbered, in a way we can afford. And that’s not predominantly by copying US equipment or US capabilities because we’ll not be able to afford them in the long run.

“That means something for the capability targets as well,” the general added, “because I would dream to have attack helicopters, and it’s a capability target, but I’m not sure that’s the future capability that will bring the right effect at the right cost and in the right mass. It might be that I can solve that problem and provide effect with other measures than significant platforms. So navigating in those weeds is new, and it’s something we learned.”