New NATO Country Sweden's Ship & Sub Challenges

Indomitable commentator Shawn Chung discussed offline Sweden's Chief of Navy Rear Admiral Ewa Ann-Sofi Haslum talking about updates in the Youtube here and below. 

 

The Chief of the Swedish Navy spoke to Naval News on the side-lines of Sydney's Indo-Pacific 2023 and Sea Power Conference, held in November 2023. Like most senior Swedish officers she speaks English clearly. 4:50 in she foreshadows Sweden will eventually order the "[A]30...next generation submarine" to eventually replace the A26 Blekinge-class. She spoke about the challenges the Swedish Navy is facing, especially with NATO membership and seabed warfare. One the latter she talked about the sabotage of the NordStream undersea gas pipelines. 

[Pete Comment: The US has been implacably opposed to these pipelines delivering Russian gas to Europe. The relative lack of West European curiosity as to who blew up those pipelines on Sept 26, 2022 might suggest the country with the motive and best equipment to do so.]

Sweden will be eventually replacing the 73m long Visby-class large patrol boat sized vessel with the future >100m long large corvette sized Lulea-class future surface combatant, https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2023/06/swedens-future-surface-combatant-to-be-known-as-lulea-class/ which looks a bit like some of the designs that were bandied about for Singapore's future MRCVs.  

Little is known about the Lulea-class (which has four ships named after Swedish coastal cities) - the size and capabilities are unknown, except it will be larger than a standard  corvette (over 100m), as Sweden now will participate in NATO naval missions. The Swedish Navy also wants the ships from 2030, which is quite a rush.. like the 6 MRCVs (from 2028), so we may find out at a later date that the Lulea-class hulls could be produced in Denmark, or Singapore, and delivered to Saab Kockums for outfitting. 

Saab Kockums has a three decade relationship with Singapore - The Bedok-class mine countermeasure vessels are Landsort-class variants. Singapore emptied out Kockum's used submarine yard by buying the Sjoormen-class (renamed Challenger-class) in the late 1990s, and two Vastergotland (now the Archer-class) in the 2010s. Saab Kockums also contributed to the design of the Independence-class littoral mission vessel. 

I also reckon that the Swedish government was lining up Singapore to buy into the A26, but the various issues with Kockums in 2014 (then owned by TKMS) scuppered any deal. Sweden basically lost over $3 billion that would have kickstarted the A26 program.

Further Background

Wiki advises "In January 2021 Saab Kockums was awarded a contract for the product definition phase of the Visby gen 2 corvettes by the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration (FMV). These [still patrol boat sized] ships were intended to be an evolved version of the Visby-class corvettes currently in service with the Swedish Navy. 

However, a rapidly changing geopolitical situation in large part due to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and Sweden's subsequent application to join NATO led to the cancellation of the Visby gen 2 in favour of a clean sheet design, the [corvette sized, with many more missiles] Luleå class."