The problem is there aren’t that many stretches of road suited for combat aircraft operations, and these are nearly as identifiable as regular tarmacs. The ability to protect airfields and repair them still have no substitute.

The problem for wich country? It´s certainly not a problem for those countries (ie. Sweden) that made roadebases as a part of their doctrine.

And I seriously doubt the ability to protect an airfield against attacks, specially if the enemy is ruling the airspace. The Iraqies for instance could´nt defend their airfields during the Desert Storm despite having a huge arsenal of AAA/SAM´s. And now with the increasing numbers of cruisemissiles and other stand-off weapons it´s even much more difficult.
When it comes to repairs I see no different. A hole in the ground is still a hole in the ground, no matter if it´s in an airfield or a roadbase.

IMO the swedish approach was the best solution for a country in that situation (a country that was defending itselves against an enemy that could have air superiority). Instead of having a couple of dozen of strongly defended airbases where a dozen fighters were sheltered in concrete bunkers (like Iraq) we had at least a couple of hundreds, less defended, runways scattered all over the place. The ratio was allmost one fighter per runway.

That forces the enemy to spend a huge amount of its resources to knock out the airforce. And if you have the huge logistics wich sweden had (an destroyed runway were to be repaired within 24h) it will keep draining resources from the enemy during the rest of the war. Offcourse, it is allso impossible to destroy the enemy airforce in an surprise attack while they are still on the ground since the fighters are scattered over such and huge area (unless you use nuclear weapons).

On the downside this solution also requires a lot of resources for the defending country. A swedish Base-90 (with Base-85 supportbattalion) could contain up to 2500 men supporting just a handful of fighters…

well the decission was pure capitalism. Wärtsila was part of the offering bid but didnt get the deal…Also, the size of those ships smells too much of this recent NATO hysteria, more suited to sweep mines in some distance African coast to support some invertion force…

But have´nt years of experience showed us that if you can master littoral tasks in the baltic sea the rest of the world is a peace of cake? I don´t think there is any sea in the world that is so hard to search, detect and hunt something under the surface as in the baltic sea. The finns have experience in that that and yet they buy their ships from Italy? Or is it just the ships and they put in other minehunting weapons on the ships?

F18 a STOL A/c ? Lol 🙂

International arms sales are a sewer and full of kick backs and bribes, however I don’t see the British, American, French, German etc. members making some claim to sit on a moral high horse on the issue. Sweden plays the arms export game like other countries and uses the same tricks and incentives to sweeten customers. If you are going to try and claim that Sweden exists on a higher moral plain then don’t whinge when you get called on it.
And unfortunately for Sweden, as others here have pointed out, more and more of the profits of Swedish arms sales are going elsewhere, to Germany and the UK to name just two countries that have bought into Swdedish industry in a major way.

I´m certainly not claiming some sort of high moral here. The only “high moral” I can think of when it comes to swedish foreign arms sales is that it is regulated by some of the toughest export-limits (by law all swedish arms sale to a foreign country is forbidden, every country has to be approved at each sale) and we could never export goods to some of the countries british, american, french or german companies are selling to. I think all this is rubbish and I hope that sweden will view things in a more sain way. Hopefully they are, just a few month ago an agreement with Saudi-Arabia (!!!!) was closed including some cooperation regarding AEW&C and such. A deal with such a country would have been impossible just a few years ago and that deal is still being discussed over here. C´mon, even sales to countries like Denmark, USA, england, Thailand, france etc is right now being discussed over here to be “illegal” and “immoral”- thanks god we just got a new government.

When it comes to bribes etc were just as bad as other countries, or at least getting there (wich is a good thing). In many markets (that has been closed due to our restricted export-policies) were newcomers and naive but I hope we´ll get as good as the competitors when it comes to “tricks” and all that.

Yes, most of the swedish armed industry is more or less owned by multinational companies, wich in it´s turn are owned by even bigger multinational banks/companies etc… But that has´nt affected the swedish industry negative a bit, on the contrast – it´s been the best thing that could have happened! Now after the cold war (when sweden was allmost the sole buyer of our gadgets) we can export much more thanks to these big companies behind us. In fact, after the end of the cold war the swedish armed industry is booming, swedish companies have bought companies all over the world and is expanding (just in the last few months SAAB has aquired companies in Denmark, Norway and southafrica and Volvo Aero has taken some work from the JSF-project). AFAIK not a single factory or company have been closed in sweden after the end of the cold war, wich is pretty good considering the devastating effect it could have had on the industry.
All the workers, engingers etc are still working in sweden, the companies are still swedish and the money goes to sweden – not germany, UK or wathever. And the most important thing – the know-how stays in sweden…

Maskirovka, you may also want to look up the following before you make a fool of yourself;

Nulka
Jindalee
Metal Storm
Kalkara
Jindavik
Wundarra
Mulloka
HMAS Jervis Bay
Armidale Class patrol boats

Australia is a large country geographically, but only has 20 million people, spread across an area larger than (all of) Europe.

Well, Sweden is also a large country, with less then half the population of Australia (nearly 9 mill.) Despite that we have/or are still designing and producing every military gadget you can think of (except military jet engines (only producing) and AAM´s (co-producing ). The only similar country I can think of that can compare to sweden is Israel, but they don´t produces their own subs, fighters, etc and still they have a massive support from USA.
Sorry, it just makes me laugh when some people thinks that australian subindustry is the top notch of the world (compared to Sweden, Japan, Germany, France etc) when they have produced a half a dozen swedish designed subs (yeah, you may call them aussie subs as much as you want, but Kockums and sweden got the money for them). Compared to the Sweden for example wich have been designing and building subs for a 130 years…

Australia will never be a major arms exporter, particularly of major stand-alone items such as destroyers or main battle tanks or fighters.

It’s capabilities lie in niche programs and systems optimised for use in Australia’s demanding environment.

Neither will Sweden due to it´s (specially in the past) strict armsexportingpolicies. And many of the system were tailormade for the swedish defences needs. Today, its a different story. A month ago we got a new government and hopefully they allow us to export more, but still , were newcomers in the international armsmarket and don´t have a powerful country behind it to support it.

It also has the capability to build systems designed elsewhere, such as the Oliver Hazard Perry frigates, the Collins class submarines and the Hobart class Air Warfare Destroyer. In most cases the end product is as good as anywhere (in the case of the OHP the two Australian built ships are substantially better than their US counterparts). Similarly the capabilities now inherent in HMA Ships Kanimbla & Manoora are light years ahead of what those vessels were capable of when they were in service in the USN.

Unicorn

So does Sweden, the different is we design it ourselves. But some things we have actually bought from abroad and adjusted (and produced offcourse) to swedish needs. Like the RBS-17 Hellfire anti-shipmissile. An ordinary US. Hellfire made into an anti-shipmissile, it was so good Norway bought it from Sweden and USA is planning to buy back the modernized missile from sweden.

But this is not a pissing-contest between australia and sweden, everyone knows now country with such a small population can compare to Sweden.
I just got enoyed over the laughs about japan and swedish submarineindustry made by some aussie members on this board. Talk about throwing bricks in a glasshouse….

The USN has a whole bevy of technologies coming up that are targeted at SSK detection. Naturally they’d want an SSK to try out those techologies on to evaluate their effectiveness and feasibility.

Bla bla bla, and so does every other country. Specially the country that has the best experience in hunting modern SSK:s in littoral invorenment with live ammo – namely Sweden… We have been hunting modern soviet SSK:s and minisubs live in the toughest littoral invorenment in the world with live ammo for over 40 years. You cant get any better than us…

But what I meant was there must be a reason US chosed HMS Gotland instead of all those others SSK:s that is out there all over the world, and wants to have her for at least one more year…

I can tell u, shes the most quite , most deadly, most sophisticated, most lethal SSK out there. And she has operational AIP, probably only Sweden has that….and has had that since 1988

We’ve all done it, the Norwegians, Japanese, Koreans, Aussies, etc–during exercises, which tends to greatly favor the submarines with very short detection range, and even shorter underwater range.

The USN is now intending to go littoral, and the threat of SSK has increased, of that there is no doubt.

Well, thats just what I said. And the US navy decided to lease a sub for a whole year – HMS Gotland. It got to be a reason for that. … Wait…. after one year of exercises they want to lease her for at least another year. Whats the reason for that?

Well, I for one am surprised. I was under the impression that the present option had already been explored unsuccessfully by the previous government. But hey, if it works it might very well be sufficient.

As for An 124 and the option of leasing such aircraft, it has been up in the parliament and they concluded that being able to fly all the way into an area of operation where a military threat might be present is crucial. And the An 124 simply doesn’t do that.

Well, from what I´ve read the ability for a fully loaded Globemaster to land on a short airstrip is highly overrated, and the airstrip the Condors demands is´nt that much longer.

Anyway, I thought I read some months ago that the swedish defence would have billions to spend on new weapons in the coming years due to the fact that other expensive purchases now is in its final deliveries (mainly the Gripen but also the CV90 IFV and soon the Visby-class corvettes) What will we spend all those billions in when we soon have payed for all those stuff?
SEP? new multipurpose terrainvehicle? attackhelicopters? YS Ny?