Corporal Frisk
@corporalfrisk
Robin Häggblom, Finnish defence and national security analyst, Senior Advisor at Risk Intelligence. My business card preaches the value of Knowing Risk.
Any talk about MiG-23 is also obviously a good excuse to post this wonderful image 😎
Both me and @hanstino.bsky.social will be at DALO Industry Days next week. We'll not have a stand, but do not hesitate to contact us if you are interested in setting up a meeting (or then you can just trust your luck and say 'Hi' if you see us walking by 😉).
If the French thought the delays and dragged out political and industrial issues that came with Franco-German cooperation were exhausting, this just might be the move to ensure European cooperation becomes fashionable once more 😅 Pictures obviously completely unrelated 😁
Obviously needs to bring back this classic when discussing the topic:
Russian Tu-142 flew “unnecessarily close” to HMS Prince of Wales in Norwegian Sea on 2 July and dropped “large number” of sonar buoys, MoD calling it "unsafe and unprofessional”. Two F-35 scrambled to intercept, notable the one on deck in first image has live missiles. h/t @deborahaynes.bsky.social
RBS 70NG to Finland! Great news, a potent system that has served us and many others well, and now coming in an upgraded version also to our neck of the woods. The original missile can be admired at Swedish Army Museum in Stockholm, which is well worth a visit.
There seems to be a debate about whether the prime days of CR7 are over, and how we should all just accept that time comes for us all and what once was a prime attacking weapon nowadays lack the punch needed to stay relevant. Oh, sorry, that was a footballer, not the Canadian rocket!
Checking in on the Swedes, who started their tournament in great style against Tunisia. Oh… 😶
Today is spent at the shores of the Baltic Sea, thinking about interesting questions. #KISS26
Found this wonderful image when searching for something else: the Swedish postal service's Driftvärn (the part of the Swedish Home Guard set up to ensure continued business as usual for authorities) practicing blowing up railway lines in the qualifications to the National Home Guard Competition.
Som ps. kan vi också notera tre J 6B Jaktfalken II till Finland 1939, men de donerades så är ju inte "riktig" exportaffär även om typen gjorde god tjänst som skolflygplan fram till 1945.
I will say those are some impressive ratios between the numbers, though! Never seen anything quite like that.
Geopolitics in practice during this morning’s trip, as the train is one of the Alstom Sm6 that were co-owned by VR and RŽD for the Allegro service between Helsinki and St Petersburg, but since the line was put on ice in 2022 they now run domestically as Pendolino Plus.
Notera för övrigt de ljusa målfläckarna på bilden jag tog, där allt som har med UAE och deras registerbeteckningar täckts över innan planet kom till Finland.
Jag har omvänt läge, en av de första GlobalEye till UAE var på besök på flygshowen i Kauhava 2021, men har aldrig sett en E-7 (jag *tror* jag sett en E-3 på avstånd i något skede, men när jag tänker efter blir jag osäker på det också 🤔).
I would imagine them inherently having better ice capability than the Visby-class on behalf of their size and steel hulls, but in any case this ice coverage map of a somewhat typical winter is quite informative regarding the difference in Finnish and Swedish requirements.
People! A break in normal programming, to announce that you should bring your spikes and come do track and field in Kokkola on Saturday 6 June. Our venerable association Gamlakarleby IF celebrate 120 years, and yours truly will be behind the microphone. Show up, and I promise a shout-out ☝️
That’s one of the two S 102B Korpen operated by the Swedish Air Force. Highly modified SIGINT-platforms, which (for what it is worth) are rumoured to be very capable ones.
Researching military mobility requirements and challenges on the ground in central Scandinavia continues this week, with significantly nicer weather than we had in Norway.
The thing that worries me about Trump's rant about NATO being a paper tiger (and Putin also thinking so) is that we have historical precedents for people not believing in the alliances of their adversaries, and in one case it ended up causing a four year-long world war with perhaps 20 million dead.
The coastal batteries will be truck-mounted, but there is the K9-on-a-truck concept which certainly is a strong contender.
It also has some rather spectacular images, such as this one courtesy of Marko Leppänen, showing a Finnish 152 mm Giatsint-B firing with a full charge during the sunset years of its career in Finland.