Denmark Plans to Strengthen Maritime Surveillance With P-8A Patrol Aircraft
The US State Department has approved a Foreign Military Sale package for Denmark, at the heart of which is the procurement of three P-8A maritime patrol aircraft. The deal is worth about $1.8 billion. The Royal Danish Air Force has operated Bombardier Challenger 604s in the maritime surveillance role since 2000, and it is not clear if the P-8As will supplement this capability or replace it.
The acquisition comes weeks after Denmark confirmed that it had placed an order for an unspecified number of Naval Strike Missile coastal defense batteries, for immediate delivery as an urgent operational requirement in 2026. This purchase of coastal defense assets was linked directly but not exclusively to improving defenses in the Danish Straits and the Western Baltic, in the wake of what are believed to have been Russian-orchestrated drone incursions which closed down Copenhagen airport on September 22.
Danish authorities identified four Russian-linked ships that potentially could have been used as launch platforms on the night in question. The P-8A acquisition is also likely to be connected to the same urgent operational requirement to improved coastal defenses close to home. But both the Naval Strike Missile coastal batteries and the P-8 assets could also have utility across the two other territories of the Kingdom of Denmark, namely the Faroe Islands and Greenland, addressing recent US claims of an increased Russian and Chinese threat facing Greenland in particular.
In September, Danish Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen linked the P-8A procurement specifically to the need to “have a better picture of what is happening around Greenland and the Faroe Islands.”
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The relatively small number of Danish aircraft being purchased increases the likelihood that the aircraft will be operated in close coordination with the P-8 aircraft, bases and infrastructure of the United Kingdom and Norway, whose P-8 fleets already work closely together. Germany signed the Trinity House agreement with the United Kingdom on September 23, which will also see the German P-8A squadron operating from RAF Lossiemouth in Scotland.
All NATO allies already work closely with US Navy P-8A aircraft operating out of Keflavik to cover Russian submarine movements through the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap – which the Faroe Islands sit in the middle of. Improving maritime surveillance in this area, already a priority, is likely to become more so in the wake of the US Coast Guard seizure of the dark fleet tanker Bella-1 (IMO 9230880) near the Faroe Islands. Dark fleet tankers of the size of the Bella-1 are too large to transit through the Danish Strait and can only reach western Russian export ports via the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap.