Mood, who during the Arendal Week participated in a debate about the state of affairs for the total defense of Norway, argues that the country’s politicians should stop pretending Norway has a military structure different from what it in reality is.

- The most important thing for Norway when we discuss the overall preparedness, which I believe to be a better word, is first of all to acknowledge where we are. Investments are coming up and long-term plans have been made. But if anything were to happen next week, if someone wanted to mercilessly exploit our weaknesses, then that would be easy – and we have plenty of weaknesses. We must acknowledge where we are at and take a stand on whether to have an independent capacity of military significance or not, he says.

- Puts together an image of weaknesses

Before an Arendal crowd holding an interest in defense, Mood argued that Moscow has a far better overview over critical infrastructure in Norway than does the Norwegian parliament, Stortinget – and that Russia thus knows how to simply make Norway go blank in a crisis situation.

Mood expands his arguments to High North News:

- These are highly skilled intelligence communities, both when we talk about Moscow as well as allied capitals. These communities work intensely to locate weaknesses, though not in the Norwegian defense. They know the Norwegian defense very well and are not much impressed with it. But they are looking for flaws in other parts of our infrastructure. I am fully convinced that Russian intelligence is putting together an image of our weaknesses and systemizes this, and that the overall impression they hold is far better than that of most of the MP’s at Stortinget, Mood says.

He stresses that some of the parliamentary committees are better informed than others, but that the majority of the MP’s nevertheless only receive information in the case of an emergency.

Warns about dependency on the USA

He argues that Norway’s total dependency on NATO and the USA may be what potentially draws Norway into a larger conflict.

Mood warns against believing that deterrence will work against Russia, and refers to hybrid scenarios becoming more relevant to large-scale scenarios than deterrence may appear to be.

- It is interesting that Russia, which holds far less military capacity than the USA and NATO, has not been deterred from using small green men on the Crimea, or from running proxy operations in the Middle East. They key point is that even when the overall deterrence works, and even when we are 100 percent dependent on the USA and NATO and trust that NATO’s article 5 will kick in, it will make the space for operating in modern hybrid scenarios more relevant. We have seen both in the Ukraine and the Middle East that there are no limits to what one can do there on a tactical level.

- You are basically warning Norway against Russia?

- I do not walk around fearing Russia. I belong to those who praise good neighborly relations, with the Svalbard Treaty and the liberation of eastern Finnmark in 1944. I like to remind people that Norway is the only neighbor with which Russia has never been at war. Russia has been existentially threatened twice, by France and Germany. And papers published in the USA now demonstrate that there were more to the promises Gorbachev claimed to have received in 1991 following the breakdown of the Soviet Union, about NATO and the EU not expanding eastwards into the power vacuum, than what western politicians have admitted until now, Mood says and adds:

- I argue that we must understand that the world looks different from Moscow. We must understand that there are many good reasons why the collective mood, both in leadership and other parts of society, is the way it is right now.