Mind the Gap VI - Relearning the Cold : Capability, Co-procurement and Industrial Foundations

By Robin Ashby, Director General UK Defence Forum; Rapporteur, High North Observatory

Strategy without industrial foundation is aspiration. The previous paper in this series described the command architecture that NATO and the Nordic nations have constructed for the High North — the structures, the headquarters, the exercise cycles. This paper examines what fills those structures: the platforms, the weapons, the training programmes, and the procurement relationships that will determine whether the Alliance's northern reconstitution matches its ambition or falls short of what the threat requires.

The lesson running through all of it is one that defence establishments periodically forget and are obliged to relearn at cost: that capability, once allowed to atrophy, does not reconstitute quickly, and that the industrial relationships underpinning it take longer to rebuild than the political decisions that dismantled them.

The Weapon That Won the Battle of Kyiv

On the night of 23-24 February 2022, a Russian armoured column approximately 40 miles long began moving on Kyiv. Its objective was the decapitation of the Ukrainian government within 72 hours — the political precondition for the rapid collapse Moscow had planned. It did not reach Kyiv. Among the weapons that stopped it was the NLAW — the Next Generation Light Anti-Tank Weapon — assembled at Thales' facility in Belfast, designed by Saab in Sweden, and delivered to Ukraine by the United Kingdom in the weeks before the invasion.

The NLAW is not primarily an Arctic weapon. But the story of how it came to exist, and how it arrived in Ukraine in the quantities that mattered, is directly relevant to the argument this paper makes about co-procurement.

Research for a Swedish light anti-tank weapon began in the 1990s. Sweden needed a man-portable system; the UK needed the same. Rather than develop two separate national programmes at double the cost and half the scale, the two nations pooled their requirements. Saab designed the weapon in Sweden. Thales assembled it in Belfast. Both nations bought into the same production run at lower unit cost than either could have achieved alone. The resulting weapon — fielded by the UK, Sweden, Finland, Luxembourg and others — was available in the quantities that made a strategic difference in Ukraine precisely because the production line had been sustained by multiple buyers across multiple procurement cycles. By March 2022 the UK had delivered over 4,000 NLAWs to Ukraine. By the following year, over 10,000. A £229 million restocking contract placed in December 2022 ensured the production line could sustain the demand.

The weapon that helped save Kyiv was the product of a procurement partnership struck decades earlier with no particular strategic drama. That is precisely the point. A Russian seizure of Kyiv in the first week would have transformed the political landscape of European resistance entirely. The manufacturing relationship that produced the counter to that outcome was a quiet procurement decision taken years before anyone knew it would matter.

The Type 26: Co-Procurement at Strategic Scale

In August 2025, the United Kingdom and Norway signed what the UK Ministry of Defence described as its largest ever warship export deal by value, and what Oslo described as Norway's largest ever defence investment: at least five Type 26 anti-submarine warfare frigates for the Royal Norwegian Navy, built at BAE Systems' Clyde shipyards alongside the eight vessels already under construction for the Royal Navy. Total programme value: £10 billion. Combined fleet: 13 hulls. First Norwegian delivery: 2030.

The Norwegian Chief of Defence had set out the procurement logic with clarity: "We need the same frigate as another ally. We cannot be the one user of a system, we are too small for that. I think that's also a lesson learned from Ukraine — you need much more standardised platforms, much more standardised weapon systems, much more standardised data, logistics."

The Type 26 — designed from the outset with one primary mission in mind, hunting Russian submarines in the North Atlantic — is being built to be as identical as possible across the Norwegian and British fleets. Norwegian and British crews will train together and serve interchangeably on identical ships. Maintenance costs will be reduced through shared spare parts and technical standards. BAE Systems and Kongsberg signed a memorandum of understanding in 2025 on industrial links across sensors, effectors and integration work. Australia and Canada have ordered variants of the same Global Combat Ship family, raising the prospect of a four-nation Type 26 operating community in the North Atlantic. The Lunna House Agreement of December 2025 — under which Britain committed to arming Royal Navy vessels with Norwegian missiles — completes a bilateral defence relationship now integrated at the platform, weapons and logistics levels simultaneously.

The honest caveat is that first delivery to Norway is not until 2030, and the full combined fleet will not be operational until well into the following decade. The gap between strategic ambition and operational reality is measured in years. In those years the Norwegian Sea must be patrolled with the assets currently available.

The UK-Netherlands Amphibious Force: Fifty Years of Proof

Before the Type 26 and before the NLAW, there was the UK-Netherlands Amphibious Force — established in 1973 and the longest-standing example of genuinely integrated Allied amphibious capability in NATO's history. For over fifty years, the Royal Marines and the Royal Netherlands Marine Corps have trained together, planned together and deployed together: in the Falklands, in the Gulf, and regularly to Norway. They do not merely exercise alongside each other. In important respects they function as a single force, with shared doctrine, shared equipment standards, and an institutional relationship that has outlasted governments, strategic reviews and budget cycles.

This matters to the argument of this paper because it demonstrates that deep bilateral defence integration is not a theoretical aspiration — it is an operational reality that has been sustained for half a century, and that delivers dividends which no amount of parallel national capability can replicate. The UK-Netherlands Amphibious Force is the model. The Type 26 partnership is its maritime successor. The NLAW was its industrial equivalent. The principle is identical: integration forged in peacetime produces capability available in crisis.

Relearning the Cold: The Royal Marines

The Royal Marines' Arctic specialism dates to the Second World War and the commando raids on occupied Norway. It survived the Cold War intact. What it did not survive undamaged was two decades of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, where Arctic warfare training was systematically deprioritised in favour of counter-insurgency and where the institutional knowledge of cold weather warfighting quietly atrophied.

Camp Viking, established in March 2023 at Øverbygd, 40 miles south of Tromsø, under a ten-year lease, is the structural acknowledgement that this gap must be closed through permanent institutional commitment rather than episodic training visits. Nearly 2,000 personnel from across the UK Commando Force deployed to northern Norway during Winter Deployment 25, equipped with new kit including the L403 rifle and 159 Lynx Brutal snowmobiles — procured from BRP Finland in a £10 million contract delivered in under nine months, a model of rapid Arctic procurement. A £140 million international programme is replacing the fleet of Swedish-origin Bv 206 and Viking all-terrain vehicles with a new Future All-Terrain Vehicle with improved amphibious capability and greater lift. Approximately 1,500 personnel are currently deployed for Cold Response 2026, alongside some 3,000 US Marines from Camp Lejeune, Dutch marines, and Nordic partners.

Rebuilding is underway. It is not yet complete. The training pipeline to restore genuine Arctic expertise at formation level — not just individual skills but collective warfighting competence in conditions that defeat the unprepared — is a five to ten year endeavour. Camp Viking is the right answer. The question is whether it has been started in time.

Denmark and Greenland: The Arctic's Western Gate

Denmark's sovereign responsibility for Greenland and the Faroe Islands gives it control over a vast swathe of Arctic and North Atlantic waters including the western approaches to the GIUK Gap — waters that are simultaneously among the most strategically significant and the most under-resourced in the Alliance's northern posture. In 2025, Denmark addressed that imbalance at a scale that constitutes transformation rather than increment.

Two Arctic and North Atlantic agreements — signed in January and October 2025 respectively — committed total investments of $13.7 billion in new Arctic capabilities: five new Arctic patrol vessels with ice-going capability and drone/helicopter support (to replace the ageing Thetis and Knud Rasmussen classes, whose repeated mechanical failures have undermined Arctic surveillance); maritime patrol aircraft; a new headquarters for Joint Arctic Command in Nuuk; additional F-35s bringing the Danish fleet to 43 aircraft; air-to-air refuelling capability; long-range drones; satellite surveillance capacity; and a new subsea cable connecting Denmark to Greenland. A new specialist Arctic unit is being established under Special Operations Command.

The scale of this investment reflects two simultaneous pressures: the genuine strategic requirement to cover the western approaches to the GIUK Gap, and the political imperative created by President Trump's renewed expressions of interest in acquiring Greenland. Denmark is demonstrating, through concrete investment rather than diplomatic protest, that it takes its Arctic sovereignty responsibilities seriously. The Greenlandic Prime Minister told the European Parliament in January 2025: "Greenland needs the European Union, and the European Union needs Greenland." The subtext was clear: Greenland's future lies within the European family, not as a US territory — but only if that family is visibly present and invested.

The EU Dimension: Kubilius and the Speed Problem

The Alliance's northern reconstitution takes place against the backdrop of a broader European defence transformation being driven with unusual urgency by Andrius Kubilius, the EU's first ever Commissioner for Defence and Space, appointed in November 2024. His central argument — that Europe must spend more, spend better, and spend European — is not new. His diagnosis of the obstacle is: "Division is our main weakness, fragmentation is our biggest obstacle." Europe has 1.86 million active military personnel across NATO members, yet the departure of fewer than 100,000 US troops could leave a dangerous strategic vacuum. Twenty-seven separate militaries, twenty-seven separate procurement systems, and a defence industrial base whose fragmentation adds cost, extends timelines and reduces interoperability. The ReArm Europe plan mobilises up to €800 billion over the coming years. The SAFE instrument provides €150 billion in loans for joint procurement.

The White Paper on the Future of European Defence, produced by Kubilius and High Representative Kaja Kallas in early 2025, adopts a five-year outlook — the same timeframe in which several European intelligence agencies estimate Russia would require to reconstitute its military capabilities sufficiently to conduct a large-scale attack on NATO territory. The implication is explicit: Europe has approximately five years to rearm before the window created by Russian attrition in Ukraine begins to close.

Two complications relevant to this series must be noted. The UK and Norway are not EU members. Both participate in some EU defence frameworks — Norway through EEA arrangements, the UK through ad hoc post-Brexit agreements — but neither has full access to the European Defence Fund or the SAFE procurement incentives. The bilateral UK-Norway relationship, the Type 26 partnership, and Camp Viking all sit outside the EU's industrial consolidation framework. This creates a structural tension that has not yet been resolved: the co-procurement model working most effectively in the northern theatre is precisely the model the EU is trying to promote institutionally — but the two leading practitioners of it are not in the room.

The second complication is speed. Kubilius has called for a move from incrementalism to a "Big Bang approach." His timeline — five years — is the same as the intelligence community's assessment of Russia's recovery window. Whether European defence industry can retool, ramp up production, and deliver at the scale and pace required within that window remains the central unanswered question of European security.

Finland's Artillery: The Deterrence Already in Place

Not all of the Alliance's northern capability requires rebuilding. Finland's contribution to NATO includes something that most European allies gave away decades ago and cannot easily recover: mass artillery. Finland maintained approximately 1,700 artillery pieces through the decades when France, Germany and the UK were drawing down — more tube artillery than those three nations combined. A significant portion faces the Kola sector directly across Finland's common border with Russia, and directly across from a Russian Northern Military District ground force that the NMD briefing paper in this series documents as having been effectively destroyed as a specialist formation in Ukraine. The combination of Finnish artillery mass facing degraded Russian Arctic ground forces is one of the most significant elements of the current military balance in the High North — and one of the least discussed.

The Industrial Lesson

The through-line connecting NLAW in the 1990s, the UK-Netherlands Amphibious Force in 1973, the Type 26 in 2025, and the Finnish snowmobile procurement in 2023 is the same: the most durable defence capabilities are those built on partnerships struck before the crisis rather than improvised within it. Kubilius is right that fragmentation is the obstacle. The Nordic nations, and the UK-Norway bilateral relationship in particular, have already demonstrated the answer. The question for the wider Alliance — and for the EU institutional framework that is still working out how to include its most capable northern partners — is whether the model can be adopted at scale before the window closes.

The next paper in this series examines the operational architecture of the High North as it now stands — the integrated picture of Russian capability, Western response, and the strategic balance between them that will shape the security of the northern maritime theatre for the decade ahead.