A US Green Beret drill with fake guerrilla fighters shows how Sweden has been preparing for an 'unconventional' clash with Russia

• In May and June, US Army Green Berets conducted unconventional warfare training in Sweden.
• Unconventional warfare is meant "to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow" a government or an occupier.

After months of tough negotiations, Turkey's president announced his support Sweden's NATO membership bid on Monday, moving the Scandinavian country a step closer to becoming the transatlantic alliance's newest member.

The addition of Sweden, already a close US military partner, will increase NATO's ability to deter and counter Russia. Swedes have been preparing for a potential war with their larger neighbor for decades, and they can teach the rest of the alliance a thing or two.

Indeed, a recent drill in northern Sweden where US Green Berets trained a guerrilla force to take on the Swedish Home Guard shows how the Swedes are planning an unconventional response to a clash with the Russians.

Sweden's unconventional warriors

Unconventional warfare is a versatile mission set that can be used to overthrow a government or defeat an invading army. In the US military, unconventional warfare is the bread and butter of the Green Berets of US Army Special Forces.

US Army Special Operations Command defines unconventional warfare as "activities conducted to enable a resistance movement of insurgency to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow a government or occupying power." To do that, Green Berets work "through or with an underground, auxiliary, and guerrilla force in a denied area."

While other members of the US special-operations community took on unconventional-warfare missions during the past 20 years of fighting in the Middle East, the Green Berets remain the premier force for it. Using knowledge of the local culture and language, teams of about 12 Green Berets recruit, train, and advise much larger partner forces into combat.

In late May and early June, Green Berets from the 10th Special Forces Group, which is assigned to Europe, trained with members of Sweden's Home Guard, which consist of "stand-by units" assigned to territorial defense and crisis response.

The US and Swedish troops trained for a variety of skill sets and missions, but halfway through the exercise, shifted into a scenario where the American commandos trained "a simulated guerilla force" composed of other Swedish troops, to take on the Home Guard.

Forming and training a guerrilla force to take on a larger unit is a classic unconventional-warfare scenario. During the drill, the Green Berets worked with their partners to plan missions that "would degrade, disrupt or destroy Home Guard capabilities," according to a US Special Operations Command Europe press release.

"The scenario gave us time to almost completely rehearse what we'd be doing in irregular warfare — conducting a link-up with a force we didn't know too much about, working through assessments, hitting a few targets to see what their capabilities are, what we have to work with and what direction we need to go," the Green Beret team sergeant said in the release.

Sweden isn't new to the Russian threat. Swedes lived in the Soviet Union's shadow during the Cold War and saw a few tense encounters with their neighbor but remained neutral until joining the EU in 1995. Despite working closely with NATO, Sweden was still militarily non-aligned until it sought NATO membership earlier this year.

During the Cold War, the Swedish government did try to prepare the public for emergencies, distributing pamphlets with guidance for how to response to conflict or other crises. Stockholm revisited those guidelines in 2018, issuing an updated document with tips and instructions for dealing with natural disasters, conflicts, and other disruptive events, including cyberattacks and disinformation.

"We must be able to resist various types of attack directed against our country," it says.

The information in the pamphlet would be key to a special-operations force conducting unconventional warfare against the Russians, as a key tenet of the mission set is winning the hearts and minds of the local population.

Winning wars unconventionally

While the US military has a long history with unconventional warfare, it leaned into the mission set two decades ago.

Following the September 11 terrorist attacks, the Pentagon opted to give special operators a leading role in the campaign against Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies. Instead of committing large numbers of conventional forces, the US military went in with Green Berets, Delta Force operators, and Night Stalkers, crushing the Taliban in a shift campaign that lasted a few weeks.

The US military is now shifting away from those kinds of campaigns and refocusing on the large-scale, conventional wars it would expect to fight against Russia or China. Unconventional warfare can still play an important role in that kind of war, but it would be a supporting role.

During the fierce fighting in North Africa during World War II, commandos from the British Special Air Service and Commonwealth Long Range Desert Group harassed German and Italian forces with constant raids behind enemy lines and were even able to destroy more aircraft on the ground than Allied air forces did in the air. German Gen. Erwin Rommel was forced to move large forces away from the frontline to defend his supply lines and airfields.

Today, Ukraine is running an unconventional-warfare campaign in Russian-occupied territory and within Russia. Ukrainian special operations have been scouting Russian positions, marking them for strikes by long-range weapons and sabotaging Russian logistical nodes and command-and-control centers.

The success of Kyiv's commandos proves that unconventional-warfare is still a valuable mission set that can be applied against any foe.

Stavros Atlamazoglou is a defense journalist specializing in special operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate. He is working toward a master's degree in strategy and cybersecurity at Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies.