Silver Wotan 2026: Bundeswehr Personnel Reinforce Gotland by Ferry and Airlift to Protect Swedish Anti-Ship Missile Batteries
Visby, 18 September 2026
Key points
- The Bundeswehr and the Swedish armed forces are conducting the bilateral exercise Silver Wotan "in the air, on land and at sea" around and on Gotland from 14 to 23 September, run by the Bundeswehr Joint Force Command with the Swedish operations staff
- More than 500 Bundeswehr personnel take part; the Swedish side puts total participation at 1,500. Two German Tornados fly airspace surveillance
- In the scenario Sweden, its own forces tied down on the mainland, asks NATO for support; German navy and air force personnel secure Visby harbour, protect convoys and help deploy and protect Sweden's land-based anti-ship missile systems, which crossed from Karlskrona by ferry and landed on 18 September
- Lieutenant General Alexander Sollfrank, the Joint Force Command's commander: "Gotland is an operationally and strategically important hub" and, in a collective-defence case, "key terrain for NATO"
German troops have landed on Gotland to guard Swedish coastal missiles, in an exercise whose premise is that Sweden cannot spare the soldiers to do it.
Stefan Sandborg, Sweden's deputy chief of operations, described "a rapid reinforcement of Gotland", bringing in "qualified systems for the defence of the island under the protection of combat aircraft, frigates, corvettes, coastal artillery and other units guarding the harbour". The Swedish armed forces run it as an operation, with live weapons covering the transport; Swedish police report a heightened threat picture around it, sabotage included, and no concrete threat. Flight-tracking data suggested at least one Luftwaffe A400M took part. The island's permanent garrison is the Gotland Regiment. Sollfrank said exercises of this kind "are not a response to an individual event" and that "visible Swedish and NATO military presence on Gotland protects the island and the Alliance".
No NATO headquarters appears in either country's account. The request in the scenario goes to NATO; the answer is organised by two national commands.
That is the finding. Sweden has planned on the assumption that in a northern or eastern crisis its army is on the mainland or in Finland, and that the island which controls the central Baltic is held by whoever can get there first, and it is now auditioning who that is. Swedish television notes that Polish troops were air-landed on Gotland last autumn; Germany now adds the sea route and the harbour. The division of labour is sensible, since the anti-ship batteries are the island's military point and the infantry around them is generic, and it is also a quiet retreat from the decision to regarrison Gotland as a national task. For the Bundeswehr it is a second standing commitment on the far side of the Baltic beside the brigade in Lithuania, taken on bilaterally and ahead of any alliance plan that has been made public. Signal No. 150 set the exercise beside June's BALTOPS. Harbour security by sailors and airmen is a rehearsal; a German battalion on the island in a 2027 edition would be a plan.
