So far, Norway has received 15 new F-35s, and three more are to arrive in May. Right now, Norwegian F-35s are on their maiden air policing mission in Iceland.
While the F-35s have been repeatedly described as the backbone of Norway's future defence and crucial to protect the country, there is trouble lurking behind the facade.
A report by the Office of the Auditor General (OAG), which the Defence Ministry insisted should be classified, has revealed a critical lack of flight technicians, the newspaper Klassekampen reported. The Norwegian Defence Ministry is struggling to recruit new personnel and retain the ones they have.
Local unions in the Air Force contacted parliamentary representatives as late as this week with a warning about the situation, but according to Klassekampen, the military's technician problem has long been known.
The air defence technicians are trained at the Kjevik school centre outside Kristiansand. The school's stated goal is to train over 40 new technicians a year, but only manages to deliver a half.
“We have a deficit of 20 to 25 people each year”, Torbjørn Strand, head of the Norwegian Officers Association at Kjevik, told Klassekampen. “It will have consequences eventually. It will cause collapse. We'll be unable to get the planes up in the air”, he said.
The association believes the problems are partly due to the Armed Forces' educational reform of 2016, which meant, among other things, that the Air Force dropped its own basic training…
