Sweden invests USD1.6 billion in air defence, buys Trackfire RWS

A surface-mounted Saab Trackfire ARES RWS. (Saab)

Sweden's Minister of Defence Pål Jonson said on 11 January that the government was investing SEK15 billion (USD1.6 billion) in what he called a Swedish air-defence system with a new concept.

A number of systems were tested by the Swedish Armed Forces in 2025, with an initial order to industry for the new programme placed during the first quarter of 2026, said Jonson, with additional procurements then taking place gradually thereafter. He added that the Swedish government has invested more than SEK40 billion in various types of air defence since 2023, but that the focus now was on short-range air defence against cruise missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

Seeking scalability, simplicity of operation, and some operational flexibility, Jonson said that the intention was to be able to produce and maintain a number of air-defence units under the new system and to retrain soldiers for it who had been trained on other air-defence systems. Those units should have “endurance and a degree of mobility”, said Jonson, with the Ministry of Defence (MoD) adding in an 11 January release that these could either be mobile or tied to defined geographical areas.

On 11 January, Sweden's MoD said in a release that the Swedish Armed Forces will be tasked with generating, training, and equipping a number of units within a future territorial air-defence system that will be able to protect combat units, military mobilisation capacity, cities, and civilian infrastructure.

The MoD is seeking an unnamed number of independent company-sized units with short-range “simple systems that are flexible so that different types of weapon, radar, and technical systems can be combined, [for example], different gun systems and different radar systems”, according to the 11 January release.