A decision has been made that the Swedish and the Finnish Navy will expand their cooperation by creating the “Swedish-Finnish Naval Task Group” (SFNTG). Based on Michael Codner’s theory of interoperability, this essay’s aim is to investigate if the Swedish and the Finnish currently are interoperable with each other, due to their military strategic concepts. According to Codner, similarities between the cooperating nation’s military strategic concepts are required in order to reach a high degree of interoperability. This essay will analyze and compare Sweden and Finland’s military strategic concepts, based on three categories; Global Projection, Territorial Defence and Combat Capability. The conclusion is that there are differences between the Swedish and the Finnish military strategic concepts in every category, of varying degrees. By looking at the results of this investigation, it is clear in what direction the two nations have to adapt their concepts to enable a high degree of interoperability for the future of the SFNTG.

Alliances should have a big amount of capabilities and strong individual states to deter successfully. NATO needs to decide who their adversary is, what actions to deter and what countermeasures to deter them. They should also increase their conventional forces and willingness to use nuclear weapons as a response to aggression. With this background in previous research the problem of this thesis is how does an alliance deterring strategy look like and how is it tailored to fit the adversary, threat and countermeasures. The aim for this thesis is to explain how the deterring strategy of NATO looks like and how it has changed since after the cold war till today. The results show that the deterring strategy has changed focus. From the focus on territorial, broad and denial deterrence in the strategic concept from 1999. To the focus on territorial, extended, broad and denial deterrence in the NATO summit meeting in Warsaw 2016.