A lot of folks at HQ in Brussels already consider the Baltic a NATO lake and whether in or out of NATO, Sweden already makes pretty good submarines and submersibles. Just don't mention the herring.*
From Defense News, December 8:
....MUCH MORESweden plans to prioritize research on underwater technologies like mine countermeasures and submarine-related systems in 2024, with studies pending on the Navy’s capabilities in that domain.
Swedish defense contractor Saab announced Dec. 5 it had signed a contract with the country’s defense acquisition agency to conduct concept development studies focused on new technologies for submarine-related capabilities.
“This contract should be viewed as one step of a long-term plan to secure underwater capabilities for Sweden,” company spokesman Conal Walker told Defense News. “Saab will study needs and possibilities for the future underwater domain, and this will include various concepts and technologies related to both current and future capabilities.”
Meanwhile, the study’s results could find application in the company’s ongoing work on Sweden’s new submarines....
*As we noted in the outro from 2020's "Dear China, Please Don't Tug On Uncle Sam's Beard, It's Not A Good Time":
And just to make things interesting maybe the U.S. could rent a couple of those super-quiet little Swedish subs:
In 2005, the USS Ronald Reagan met its match in the form of a single, diesel-powered Swedish submarine. During war games, the plucky submarine was able to sneak through the passive sonar defenses ...
And moving into the present, this story crossed the wires a couple days ago:
Saab announces undersea drone sale to Kuwait
Finally, the herring. Also from 2020:
"For 15 Years Sweden Thought Enemy Submarines Were Invading Its Territory. It Turned Out To Be Herring Farts"One of the scientists who broke the case, Magnus Wahlberg, was awarded the igNobel Prize in Biology by Harvard's Journal of Improbable Research (shared with a team from Scotland who independently came to similar conclusions as to what the Herring were up to.)
https://www.improbable.com/about/people/MagnusWahlberg.html
From the 2004 awards: https://improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig2004:
BIOLOGY: Ben Wilson of the University of British Columbia, Lawrence Dill of Simon Fraser University [Canada], Robert Batty of the Scottish Association for Marine Science, Magnus Whalberg of the University of Aarhus [Denmark], and Hakan Westerberg of Sweden’s National Board of Fisheries, for showing that herrings apparently communicate by farting.
REFERENCE: “Sounds Produced by Herring (Clupea harengus) Bubble Release,” Magnus Wahlberg and Håkan Westerberg, Aquatic Living Resources, vol. 16, 2003, pp. 271-5.
REFERENCE: “Pacific and Atlantic Herring Produce Burst Pulse Sounds,” Ben Wilson, Robert S. Batty and Lawrence M. Dill, Biology Letters, vol. 271, 2003, pp. S95-S97.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Lawrence Dill, Robert Batty, Magnus Whalberg, Hakan Westerberg.
Quite
amazing that two separate teams were working on the problem and came to
the same conclusion. Have I ever mentioned simultaneous discovery? (Why
yes, yes I have):
There is a phenomena is science known as simultaneous discovery or simultaneous invention. The two most famous examples are probably calculus and evolution but there are dozens if not hundreds of cases.