By Gwladys Fouche
OSLO, Dec 5 (Reuters) – Norway plans to buy two additional submarines from Germany and a separate procurement of long-range artillery, the defence ministry said on Friday, at a much higher cost than before partly due to high demand for military equipment.
The submarine order comes in addition to four submarines the Nordic country ordered from Germany’s Thyssenkrupp in 2021 for a then-value of 45 billion crowns. The new submarines will also be ordered from Thyssenkrupp.
The updated submarine order will cost 46 billion crowns ($4.55 billion), bringing the total cost to close to 100 billion crowns partly due to inflation in the costs of raw materials and of defence equipment.
NATO countries are in the midst of hiking defence spending, under pressure from the U.S. administration of President Donald Trump and unnerved by the continuing war in Ukraine.
Norway is NATO’s monitor for the vast 2 million square kilometres (772,000 square miles) area of the North Atlantic used by the Russian northern fleet’s nuclear submarines.
A key mission for the submarines will be to monitor Russian ones, whose base is on the Kola Peninsula, an area in the Arctic bordering Norway.
“We see that Russian forces in the North Atlantic and the Barents Sea are increasing their activities,” Defence Minister Tore Sandvik said in a statement.
The first of the six submarines is expected to be delivered in 2029, the ministry said.
Separately, Norway plans to buy for its army long-distance missiles, which can reach targets 500 km (310 miles) away, for 19 billion crowns.
The war in Ukraine, and the predominance of missile attacks, has shown Western countries the need to boost that attack ability.
“It is important we have a defence capability that can deter a possible enemy from doing us harm,” Sandvik said in a statement.
($1 = 10.1044 Norwegian crowns)
(Reporting by Gwladys Fouche, editing by Terje Solsvik)
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