- This is, of course, true. During both world wars and the Cold War as well, Sweden relied mainly on domestically developed and produced weapons.
In today’s globalized world, our arms industry has become more integrated with American, British and other European companies in this business. For instance, there have been several different mergers and projects of cooperation between British BAE, Swedish Bofors and Swedish SAAB (most people associate SAAB with cars but SAAB Automobile - which was bought by GM - was just a division of SAAB). Another example is of course the XM982 Excalibur missile which is the result of a American-British-Swedish cooperation.
As a Swede, I look forward to continued collaboration with USA in this field.
“It makes me wonder... What would happen if you guys got pissed off enough to go to war?”
- Some years ago, Sweden in fact had one of the world’s strongest armies measured in mobility times firepower. During the end of the Cold War, We could’ve mobilized around 1 million men. Add the production capacity in terms of military equipment of a very diversified and highly productive industry (that could’ve produced tons of artillery, submarines, tanks, fighter planes etc) to this and you naturally get a war machine with ability to inflict even more harm than many larger industrially developed countries. One basic aspect is that we have a lot of industry like steel works and automotive industry (and not only cars, Sweden is one of the world’s largest producers of heavy trucks and buses, meaning we could easily transform these plants a bit and start producing a lot of tanks if we wished to)
By today we have downsized our armed forces, but we still got a lot of competence in the area of defense. However, I think one of the reasons why our present Conservative government keep cutting the defense budget is they want Sweden to join the NATO.
It will probably happen sooner or later.
Best of regards!
You tell your people: Keep building kick-ass weaponry. The world will leave you be.