Travelling well over the speed of sound, a fighter jet or ballistic missile can cross even the widest parts of the Baltic Sea in just a few minutes. Under such circumstances, seconds count. Advanced aerial defence solutions are needed to buy valuable time.
In these episodes
Modern aerial threats can take a wide range of shapes and forms. An explosion in unmanned aerial vehicles in recent years has led to the proliferation of both large attack drones and weaponised swarms of smaller drones. Add to this more conventional threats, such as jet fighters and ballistic missiles fired from land, sea and air. At times, drones and aircraft can clash. This was demonstrated in early 2023 when a Russian fighter jet forced down a US Air Force drone over the Black Sea. The drone and two Su-27 jets were flying over international waters when one of the aircraft flew in front of the drone and dumped fuel on it.
While it plays a big role in European affairs, the Baltic Sea is a relatively small sea by world standards. It is 1600 kilometres long, but has an average width of just 193 kilometres. Given that modern jet fighters can often travel at twice the speed of sound and ballistic missiles can reach hypersonic speeds, the Baltic Sea can be crossed by an airborne threat in a matter of minutes. That leaves very little time for a nation under attack to detect and identify a threat, decide on a course of action and launch countermeasures. It’s not only minutes that count in determining the outcome, but seconds and microseconds.
The key to managing fast-moving aerial threats lies in early detection. Using a range of radar systems and passive sensors both in fixed and mobile installations enables emerging threats to be quickly detected. Managing the inputs from these sensors and positively identifying the threat requires the use of an advanced combat management system. With help from artificial intelligence and machine learning, users can determine the right course of action in seconds, be it scrambling fighter jets or alerting ground-based air defence.
Creating more time to act
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.”
“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.”