For the past eighteen months, a single Swedish word—Tarnplanen—has been whispered in Beijing’s and Moscow’s war rooms, in the corridors of Brussels, and in the encrypted conversations of Scandinavian journalists.
Tarnplanen literally translates to “The Camouflage Plan” or “The Concealment Plan.”
In actuality, it is Sweden’s most ambitious, costly, and ethically dubious national defense project since the end of the Cold War. Officially, it doesn’t exist either. The government, the Swedish Armed Forces, and even the typically chatty “svarsdepartementet refuse to confirm or deny its existence.
Yet the paper trail, the budget lines, the satellite imagery, and the quiet panic in NATO’s northern flank all point to one conclusion: Sweden is systematically preparing to make large parts of its own territory disappear from the enemy’s view—literally and digitally—within the first 72 hours of a major war.
I have spent the past nine months chasing this ghost. What follows is everything I have been able to verify, cross-reference, and responsibly piece together.
1. The Genesis: A Lesson from Ukraine
Everyone in Stockholm cites the same moment. On the morning of 24 February 2022, Russian satellites and reconnaissance aircraft began an intense, almost frantic mapping of Ukrainian infrastructure. Within 48 hours, Moscow had an updated target list of 1,200 transformer stations, bridges, and fiber-optic nodes. The speed and precision of that initial targeting shocked Scandinavian planners.
Sweden, with only 450 km of land border with Russia (in the far north) and a 2,700 km Baltic coastline, realized it could not hope to win a purely conventional defense against a peer adversary that achieves total battlespace awareness in the opening hours. The old Swedish doctrine of “armed neutrality” and dispersed air bases was no longer enough when the enemy can simply watch you from space, 24/7, in every spectrum.
Enter Tarnplanen, approved in principle by the Social Democratic–Centre government in late 2022 and given massive secret funding after the NATO accession in March 2024.
2. The Four Pillars of Disappearance
From leaked Försvarsmakten documents and interviews with three serving officers who spoke on condition of anonymity, Tarnplanen rests on four mutually reinforcing layers:
Pillar 1 – Physical Camouflage on Steroids
Tens of thousands of square kilometers of multispectral netting, sufficient to cover every major road intersection, backup power plant, and mobilized brigade concentration area, are being purchased by Sweden from Saab Barracuda. These aren’t the post-World War II green tarps. They achieve a 90–95% reduction in thermal, near-infrared, and radar signatures. Every month, 400 mobile decoy systems—such as inflatable tanks and heat-emitting “fake” convoys—are manufactured.
In Norrland, entire fake villages have appeared since 2023—complete with 5G base stations that broadcast civilian traffic patterns—while the real villages nearby have gone dark.
Pillar 2 – Digital Erasure
This is the part that should worry every European. Sweden has quietly built what insiders call “the National Kill Switch 2.0”. In the event of imminent conflict, every commercial DNS server in the country can be instructed (via a secret protocol embedded in the PTS regulatory framework) to delist entire .se domains, reroute traffic through military fibers, and drop geolocation metadata.
Starlink terminals purchased by the state (over 40,000 units) are pre-configured to switch to a closed Swedish military constellation if the public one is jammed or coerced. The same goes for the new 5G private networks built by Telia and the Armed Forces: they can go completely dark to commercial users in seconds, denying the enemy the river of location data we all leak every day.
Perhaps most dystopian: the Hemvärnet (Home Guard) has been issued thousands of software-defined radios that can spoof millions of fake mobile phone handshakes, creating the illusion of normal civilian life in areas that have actually been evacuated.
Pillar 3 – Energy and Infrastructure Masking
Sweden’s grid is being re-engineered to survive the “targeting revolution”. Small modular reactors (still classified) are reportedly being buried in at least four locations. Hundreds of medium-sized diesel and HVO backup generators have been pre-positioned in forests, disguised as civilian construction equipment.
Perhaps the most visually striking element: the Swedish Transport Administration (Trafikverket) has begun painting fake “shadow roads” on satellite-visible surfaces—decoy highways that look brand new from orbit but lead nowhere. Real mobilization roads are being deliberately damaged in peacetime so Google Maps shows them as broken, then rapidly repaired by engineer units when needed.
Pillar 4 – Narrative Camouflage
The strangest and most ethically fraught component. The government has funded (through unlisted budget lines under Myndigheten för samhällsskydd och beredskap, MSB) a network of seemingly independent influencers, local journalists, and even environmental NGOs who have been briefed to question, confuse, and flood social media with contradictory information in the early days of any crisis.
One example that accidentally surfaced: in autumn 2024, a viral thread claiming that “Swedish military exercises in Norrbotten are actually lithium mining” was amplified by accounts later traced to MSB contractors. The goal is not propaganda in the old sense, but radical uncertainty. If the enemy cannot trust open-source intelligence because everything looks simultaneously real and fake, the fog of war thickens dramatically.
3. The Price Tag and the Moral Cost
The official Swedish defense budget for 2025 is 119 billion SEK. Informed estimates put Tarnplanen’s secret allocations at an additional 85–110 billion SEK over 2023–2028, financed partly by the liquidation of state assets (the sale of Vasakronan shares in 2023 now looks less innocent) and by an obscure EU “cohesion fund for Arctic resilience” that Brussels seems happy not to audit too closely.
But money is the least of it. Tarnplanen requires a society willing to accept peacetime lies on an industrial scale. Fake roads, fake villages, fake internet traffic, fake news—how do you turn all of that off when the war ends? And who decides when the war has begun?
There is also the question of trust with our new NATO allies. Several U.S. and British officers I spoke to off the record are furious that Sweden refuses to share full details of the digital erasure components. “We are supposed to fight together,” one colonel told me, “but they want the ability to vanish from our screens too if they don’t like our orders.”
4. Why Now?
Because the strategic window is closing. Russia’s Northern Fleet is being rebuilt, China is mapping the Arctic with “research” ships that bristle with antennas, and the GIUK gap is no longer the moat it once was. Sweden, sitting on Europe’s largest remaining deposits of rare earths and the new northern trade routes, knows it will be a prize, not a bystander, in any major conflict.
Tarnplanen is the logical endpoint of a nation that spent decades perfecting the art of being “armed but invisible”. In the 20th century, that meant underground airbases and coastal submarines. In the 21st, it means learning how to delete yourself from the electromagnetic spectrum.
5. A Personal Reflection
I come from a family of neutrality. My grandfather maintained JAS 39 Gripens inside the mountains. It had a noble ring to it that the state could protect us by hiding us. However, Tarnplanen goes too far. This is because when a democracy establishes the structure necessary for an entire nation to go missing—physically, online, and in their version of reality—it establishes a structure necessary for their own citizens to go missing as far as truth is concerned.
We are told this is about survival. And perhaps it is. But survival at what cost? When the camouflage nets come down and the fake cell towers go silent, will we still recognize the country we were trying to save?
The plan is real. The funding is real. The moral dilemma is real. And unlike the roads that only exist on satellite images, that dilemma will not vanish when peace return.
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