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Further Reading

Haren / Royal Norwegian Army

The principal task of the Norwegian Army is to: - provide land-based defence against invasion of one part of the country, at present North Norway; guard the border with Russia; maintain a presence in the rest of the country to combat any minor incursion; contribute one battalion to NATO's implementation forces; participate in UN forces, contributing up to 1,600 men; and support the civil community.

The Norwegian Army is partly a conscript army and partly a volunteer force, where the basic building block for the Army's forces is the conscript force. All conscriptsmust go through a mandatory one-year training period that comprises the basic training. Implementation of new technology, new weapons, and new areas with regard to training. The most important tool for supporting the training is the Norwegian Army Combat Maneuver Training Centre (NACMTC).

The Army is the largest and oldest of the service branches, and the core of the Norwegian Armed Forces. The Army produces credible capacity of combat through the education of soldiers and units. At the same time it is a force participating in live missions. The Army consists of the units and capacities - the personnel and the equiment - that are under the command of the Chief of Staff of the Norwegian Army (COS NO A), as well as the forces he at any given time may have detached to the operational leadership of the Armed Forces and Commander National Joint Headquarters (NJHQ). Formally, COS NO A is the one receiving the missions from the Chief of Defence.

The realities to which Norway's Army must adapt are the end of the Cold War, and the luxury of an extensive national defence organization largely paid for by others. This requires the transition from "Napoleon's legacy" of personnel-intensive massed armies to a capital-intensive modern defence force capable of responding swiftly to recurrent and/or unforeseen emergencies but requiring a huge investment in training and technology - and the resulting need to cut operating costs and streamline the organization.

To mitigate challenges required increasing the size of the Armed Forces. The increase is likely to happen in the Army, with regard to both a significantly increased budget, and to the reorganization of one of the maneuver battalions in north Norway from a conscript battalion to a volunteer battalion, and thus give the army an enhanced capability for rapid response to a crisis or threat.

The Norwegian Army's newly approved training doctrine states that the Norwegian Army should be capable of conducting full spectrum operations, which, according to the doctrine, embrace four main types of operations; combat operations, stability operations, humanitarian operations, and information operations.

Domestic factors influence how the Norwegian Army carries out training and combat preparations. These include the location of the Army's forces throughout the country, the balance between conscriptunits and volunteer units in the Army, and the economy. However, probably the two most important domestic factors are the training paradigms within the Army and the effects of the ongoing military transformation.