These days, NATO worries that Russia might attack its airbases. Almost uniquely within the alliance (Finland has a similar system), Sweden is prepared for such contingencies: It has an extensive network of roads that double as military runways. It also has aircraft capable of landing and taking off on such roads—and officers and soldiers able to service and move the aircraft within minutes. With Western air dominance no longer guaranteed, other NATO members can learn from Sweden’s dual-use roads.
It’s one of my lasting childhood memories: the rural road near my house that was much wider than the other local roads—and the fact that seemingly ordinary cargo trucks from Warsaw Pact states (I especially remember Polish ones) parked themselves nearby with unusual frequency. This was during the Cold War, and Western trade with the Warsaw Pact was minuscule, but there they were, the trucks that mysteriously kept idling near the road.
That’s because this was one of the roads—spread across Sweden—that doubled as military runways. “The idea was to move the planes around faster than the Soviets could do surveillance of them,” said Col. Carl Bergqvist, a fighter pilot and the Swedish Air Force’s current chief of plans. In addition to the highway landing strips, which are normally around a half mile long, Sweden’s clever system featured several shorter connecting roads that were used for taxiing and led to a multitude of aircraft parking spots. “The air force constantly used different parking spots so the Soviets wouldn’t know where the planes were,” Bergqvist said. The aircraft—first Draken, then Viggen—were serviced by similarly nimble crews, usually consisting of only one officer and a handful of conscripts.
It was a bit like a Swedish-Warsaw Pact game of hide-and-seek involving fighter jets, and for neutral Sweden—which had a disproportionately large air force—air power was indispensable. Everyone remembered what happened to Egypt in 1967, when Israel eliminated more than 90 percent of Egypt’s air force in one swoop by bombing aircraft on the tarmac and followed up by decimating Syria’s and Jordan’s air forces in the same fashion.
If the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies had managed to knock out Sweden’s air force, the Swedish Army would have faced an almost insurmountable task fending off the invader. For Sweden, bedeviling the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies by constantly moving its fighter jets and other aircraft between military bases and roads was an existential question.
Yes, the Soviets had figured out where some of those roads were (hence the constant presence of mysterious trucks in the vicinity of the road near my house), but they could never know which aircraft would be where—and the planes were in constant motion, thanks to the incredibly swift turnaround mastered by the ground crews. The Swedish Air Force was, of course, alert to the Eastern Bloc’s attention and cleverly disguised its activities to the extent possible when gigantic birds are involved. After a plane landed, it would taxi into a forest, and within minutes of arriving it would be ready to take off again.
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A black and white photo shows three maintenance crew members on the ground under a fighter jet with a pilot in the cockpit. Netting surrounds the plane in a forest. - Workers prepare a fighter jet for takeoff at a forest maintenance station in Sweden during the Cold War. F6
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A maintenance worker is seen small pulling a hose at left toward a jet facing away toward the forest. A net is over the plane. - A Swedish Air Force fighter jet sits in a forest maintenance area connected to a runway in 1969. Swedish Air Force
Sweden still possesses this runway system—and yes, it’s still very much in use. “It’s not particularly difficult to land a JAS Gripen, or a Viggen, on a road,” Bergqvist told me. “They’re built to be able to do this sort of thing, and as a Swedish pilot you learn it early in your training.” (The Viggen was the Gripen’s predecessor. You can watch a Viggen take off from a road here and here. Watch the Gripen land on different roads here. This 1980 Swedish documentary about a road-landing strip is informative even for those who don’t speak Swedish.) Though the Swedish military doesn’t reveal exactly where the road-runways and their connected aircraft maintenance sites are located, it has a map showing the location of four of them: in the south of the country, the center, and the far north.
Indeed, keeping fighter aircraft safe is quickly becoming more important, since today Russian air power once again poses a threat to the West. And now that Sweden is a member of NATO, the alliance’s other members have easy access to the country that has mastered the art of landing anywhere. This expertise is not lost on NATO HQ. “#DidYouKnow that many Swedish roads can double as runways for fighter jets?” the alliance’s X account posted on Aug. 6. “The Swedish Air Force practise the delicate art of landing on regular roads to give them extra flexibility in the event of a crisis.”
Berqvist noted: “There’s massive interest in the Swedish-Finnish system. NATO sees this as part of the Agile Combat Employment concept.” The concept is referred to as ACE.
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ACE, essentially, is an alliance-wide effort to do the same thing as the Swedish Air Force’s road-runways. “ACE is an operational scheme of manoeuvre designed to improve resilience and survivability while generating air combat power from both home bases and geographically dispersed locations,” a 2024 NATO release stated.
To make road runways work, said retired Royal Air Force (RAF) Air Marshal Edward Stringer, who was a fighter pilot, “you need to make sure the roads can take it; those sections need to be built to runway standards, and you have to put in the minimum base infrastructure.”
Like Sweden, Finland does indeed possess roads designated as landing strips, but these days the Finnish Air Force flies Hornets, which are soon to be joined by F-35s. These are sophisticated and powerful aircraft, but they need large maintenance crews and lengthy runways. Although two Norwegian F-35s landed on a Finnish highway last year, road landings are not the F-35’s specialty. In early September, the Finnish Air Force will undertake this year’s iteration of its annual road-landing exercise, which will involve Hornets, Hawk jet trainers, and transport and liaison aircraft.
A Swedish Gripen fighter jet takes off from a highway during an exercise near Gothenburg on May 21. NATO
And like Finland, most NATO member states fly F-35s or other U.S.-made aircraft. If countries want road-landing capabilities, they “need to design the aircraft for it too,” Stringer said. “That means airframes and undercarriages that are sturdy and handle well on rougher ground. It also means simple maintenance procedures designed so that teams of conscripts with minimal toolkits can do the servicing. Saab’s Gripen is the exemplar here.” But within NATO, only Sweden, Hungary, and the Czech Republic have Swedish-built Gripens.
RAF pilots (including Stringer) flew Jaguars—which could, and did, land on highways and operate from rough or icy airstrips—until the air force retired the aircraft in 2007. They also had Harriers, which can do vertical take-offs and landings and routinely practiced deploying to hides in the woods, but retired them in 2010. These days, RAF flies F-35s and Typhoons.
And there’s another challenge facing NATO countries keen to foil prospective attacks on their fighter-jet fleets: They’d need a change in culture. “The Swedish model is to use a small number of people who are given a great deal of trust,” Bergqvist pointed out. “It’s a different culture and mindset compared to many other air forces.”
But cultures can change. Indeed, it’s astonishing how quickly mentalities can change when threats do. And even though European nations’ air force bases are vastly better protected than those of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in 1967, Europe today can’t simply assume that its impressive fleet of fighter jets will be safe in situ. “The Swedish system can be done by almost anyone with the wit to make it work,” Stringer said. “But it’s much easier if you design the whole system from the ground up.” And if European citizens had the opportunity to see evidence of their air forces on a country road near them, they might—like I and so many other Swedes did at a young age—realize that the armed forces are integral parts of our society.