Northern Sentinels

A Cold War–style naval partnership returns to the North Atlantic, as Britain and Norway prepare to guard the arteries of the modern world from a resurgent Russia.

The recent Lunna House pact between Britain and Norway is a telling marker of how Europe’s northern flank is being quietly remilitarised by necessity amid the steady shadow of Russia’s submarines.

The deal allows the Royal Navy and the Royal Norwegian Navy to operate a joint fleet of British-built Type-26 frigates, among the most advanced submarine-hunters afloat. Officially, the mission is to protect critical undersea cables and monitor naval movements across the long arc of water stretching from Greenland past Iceland to Britain (the famous GIUK gap that once obsessed Cold War planners.) Its unambiguous aim is to make life harder for Moscow’s increasingly visible maritime presence in northern Europe.

The choice of name is no sentimental flourish. Lunna House, in the Shetland Isles, served as a clandestine base for the Norwegian resistance during the Second World War, a quiet outpost in the struggle against Nazi occupation. By invoking it now, Britain and Norway are placing their new naval arrangement within a lineage of northern vigilance against continental threats - first German, now Russian.

Undersea cables have become the world’s most delicate arteries. More than 95 percent of global internet traffic flows through them. Financial systems, energy networks, military communications and everyday commerce depend on glass fibres barely thicker than a garden hose. Russia, whose navy never fully recovered from the Soviet collapse, has made asymmetric disruption a strategic calling card.

The British Ministry of Defence reports a 30 percent rise in Russian vessels sighted in UK waters over the past two years. Moscow protests that its ships are merely exercising their rights in international waters. Western officials are unconvinced.

During the Cold War, the North Atlantic was the primary arena for Soviet attempts to break into the open ocean through the narrow sea lanes between Greenland, Iceland and Britain. NATO built an elaborate system of sonar arrays, patrol aircraft and escort fleets to bottle up Soviet submarines before they could threaten transatlantic shipping or loom beneath American cities. That system decayed after 1991, casualties of peace dividends and shrinking budgets. The oceans were meant to be boring again.

They are not. Russia’s modern navy is smaller than its Soviet predecessor but no less determined. Its submarines are quieter; its doctrine more elastic. Rather than seeking fleet-to-fleet confrontation, Moscow probes for vulnerabilities like energy pipelines, wind farms, data cables whose destruction would paralyse societies without firing a missile. The Baltic pipeline explosions of 2022 were a brutal demonstration of what sabotage beneath the waves can achieve, even when the perpetrator remains officially unknown.

Against this background, the UK–Norway pact looks less like a bilateral curiosity than a down payment on a rebuilt northern NATO. The agreement rests on a £10bn warship deal under which Oslo will buy five Type-26 frigates from Britain’s BAE Systems, built in Glasgow. Combined with eight British vessels, the two navies will field at least 13 specialised anti-submarine hunters operating as a single force. For Britain, the arrangement flatters its self-image as a serious maritime power after Brexit. For Norway, whose vast offshore energy infrastructure makes it uniquely vulnerable, it is an exercise in survival.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has framed the pact as both a security necessity and an industrial strategy, touting shipyard jobs alongside national defence. His description of Norway as an “absolutely vital member of the coalition of the willing” is equally telling.

NATO may be the formal structure, but coalitions within coalitions now do much of the work. Europe’s northern states - Britain, Norway, the Nordics and the Netherlands - are knitting themselves into tighter operational clusters, often faster than alliance bureaucracy can manage.

For Russia, a  joint Anglo-Norwegian fleet patrolling the approaches to the Arctic and the Atlantic constrains its options and sharpens the sense of encirclement it already claims to feel. Yet Moscow’s own behaviour has invited exactly this response. By turning the seabed into a potential battlefield, it has forced democracies to rediscover the strategic importance of waters they once took for granted.