A Frigate for Sweden

When I first got the hint that Sweden might be in some kind of talks with Naval Group about FDI, I will admit I thought it an unlikely scenario. Still, ’talks’ may mean a lot of different things, and I trusted the source enough to ask FMV about, who to my surprise confirmed that they had gotten an additional task of looking at existing solutions to the requirement for Ytstridsfartyg Ny, or the Luleå-class as it had become by then. This evolved quickly into a competition between three different designs: the Saab/Babcock (or Babcock/Saab, if you ask the British) Arrowhead 120, the Alfa 4000 by Navantia, and the FDI. Since the classic kids-show ’Fem myror är fler än fyra elefanter’ (En. ’Five ants are more than four elephants’) has been brought up already in the discussion, we can in the spirit of Brasse’s favourite game note that it is immediately obvious that one of these are different from the others: The FDI is already sailing, it has in fact already been deployed operationally by…