Sweden Orders Four French FDI Frigates, Seven Times Bigger Than Its Largest Warship Today

Sweden's Defence Materiel Administration and Naval Group signed a €4.3 billion contract in Stockholm on August 31, 2026 for four Défense et Intervention frigates, confirming the design selection Sweden made in May. The ships will be delivered one per year between 2030 and 2034 and will enter service as the Luleå class, named Luleå, Norrköping, Trelleborg and Halmstad.

The contract was signed aboard the lead French unit, berthed in Stockholm for the occasion, in the presence of the French president and the Swedish prime minister. It covers the ships, their combat system integration and the associated support; a naval cruise missile fit, carried by the French ships of the class, remains an option Sweden has not taken up.

The armament is a deliberate hybrid. The frigates will carry the French Aster 30 and the European CAMM-ER for air defense, layered above Swedish equipment: the RBS15 anti-ship missile, the Torpedo 47 lightweight torpedo, a Saab Giraffe 1X radar, and 57 mm and 40 mm guns. Stockholm has presented the combination as roughly tripling the fleet's air-defense capacity.

That capacity is the point of the purchase, and the numbers explain why. The largest surface combatants in Swedish naval service today are five Visby-class corvettes of 640 tons, backed by two 425-ton Göteborg-class corvettes and a screen of Tapper-class patrol craft and Koster-class mine countermeasures vessels. At roughly 4,460 tons and 122 meters, an FDI displaces about seven times as much as a Visby. Sweden's blue-water combat power has until now rested largely on its submarine arm — three Gotland-class boats and the two Blekinge-class A26 submarines now under construction.

Sweden is the second export customer for the FDI, after Greece, whose four ships are named Kimon, Nearchos, Formion and Themistokles. With the five hulls destined for the French Navy, the program now stands at thirteen ships ordered across three navies. For France the design is the mid-tier complement to the FREMM frigates; for Naval Group the Swedish contract is a first frigate export to a Nordic customer.

Sweden joined NATO in March 2024, and the frigate order is the largest single naval procurement it has made since. The stated requirement spans the Baltic, the North Sea and the High North — an operating area that reaches well beyond the littoral waters the Visby class was optimized for, and one where sustained air defense over a task group matters more than the stealth and shallow-water agility that shaped Sweden's previous generation of warships. The world navy rankings place Sweden well outside the top tier on hull count; the four frigates will not change that, but they change what the fleet can be asked to do.

The class is built at Naval Group's Lorient yard. The date of the first steel cut for the Swedish ships has not been announced.