Advances in technology mean the time between an aerial threat appearing over the Baltic Sea and it arriving at its target has never been shorter.

In these episodes, Patrik Gardesten, Deputy Chief of the Swedish Navy, explains, “The Baltic Sea is a small sea. There's a threat here and it comes from attack aircraft, from guided missiles and other missiles. In order to meet this we need good sensors and good weapon systems.”

Angelica Persson, Business Development Analyst at Saab, fully agrees. “[Aerial threats] can reach us from very long distances and they also come at extremely high speeds – supersonic speeds – which makes them extremely difficult to take action against,” she says. “In order to manage this type of threat, for example, tactical ballistic missiles, we need to ensure that the right system has the right information at the right point in time in order to be able to operate against them in an optimised way.”

Johan Hägg, Naval Product Manager at Saab, explains Saab’s air defence solutions rely on many integrated parts to provide coverage. “We have both active sensors, radar and others, and passive sensors which can detect such threats,” he says. “We bring this together in a management system that can investigate what kind of threat it is and then we have a number of different working parts which we can choose to use. It becomes a complete function chain.”

We would like to thank the Swedish Armed Forces, the Finnish Defence Forces and the Swedish Coast Guard for footage and support.