Andreas Svanlund
Andreas Svanlund is a Norwegian strategist, business architect, and geopolitical analyst working at the intersection of national resilience, industrial strategy, and the emerging multipolar world order. He is part of a new generation of European thinkers who argue that sovereignty and prosperity cannot be safeguarded by rhetoric alone, but must be rooted in the material foundations of power: energy, resources, industry, and competent leadership.
His intellectual output is unusual in the European policy sphere — not academic theory or detached commentary, but grounded in lived operational experience, commercial execution, and a systems-level understanding of how nations succeed or decline.
Military Foundation and Strategic Mindset
Svanlund spent twelve years as an officer in the Norwegian Armed Forces, where he learned to think in terms of objectives, constraints, and consequences rather than ideology or procedural compliance. This shaped both his worldview and leadership style: clarity of intent, decisive action, and a deep skepticism of systems that mistake process for progress.
His operational experience gave him a vantage point rarely found in European policy discussions — an instinctive grasp that resilience is not legislated into existence but built, maintained, and defended. He remains vocal about the fact that many Western societies now suffer from managerialism — systems that stabilize themselves at the cost of responsiveness and renewal.
Industrial Transformation in the Defense Sector
After leaving the military in 2010, Svanlund entered the defense industry, where he helped transform Oskar Pedersen AS into one of Scandinavia’s most significant equipment providers to police and armed forces.
Under his commercial leadership, the company shifted from a traditional supplier to a strategic partner, securing major framework contracts across multiple countries for protective equipment, robotics, and mission-critical systems. This level of growth was atypical for a Nordic independent company, and industry observers credit Svanlund’s operational credibility, commercial instinct, and strategic positioning.
One landmark achievement during his tenure was the development of the Nordic Combat Uniform System — a multinational procurement initiative resulting in a €425 million contract involving the armed forces of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark. The program became a rare case of successful cross-border defense cooperation in an increasingly fragmented Europe.
Energy, Sovereignty, and the New Resource Frontier
Anticipating the rise of geopolitical competition over critical minerals, Svanlund shifted to offshore energy and marine mineral strategy. Years before the issue reached political awareness, he warned that European political elites lacked understanding of supply chain vulnerabilities, particularly regarding Chinese dominance in mineral processing.
In 2021, he briefed representatives from the National Security Agency on Norway’s mineral supply chain vulnerabilites. The meeting revealed how little Western strategic planners knew about the issue — reinforcing his belief that strategic institutions no longer default to thinking in “material terms” unless someone forces the facts onto the table.
In January 2024, the Norwegian Parliament approved opening parts of the continental shelf for deep-sea exploration — a decision influenced by the strategic logic Svanlund, among others, helped circulate domestically and internationally: that resource-rich nations must think like producers if they are to retain agency in a multipolar world.
Industrial Operator: Energy Asset Optimization
Today, Svanlund works in the oil and gas sector, applying strategic thinking to operational constraints. His company’s proprietary non-entry, closed-loop chemical cleaning system reduces maintenance downtime on producing installations from several weeks to just a few days. Since 2007, it has been successfully deployed on live offshore platforms across the North Sea.
This isn’t just cost savings — it’s energy security. For Svanlund, available production hours are the real denominator of national reliability. His work exemplifies a central thesis: geopolitical choices are constrained or enabled by physical systems, not debates.
He openly states his intention to eventually bring this capability to the United States, where industrial scale and national urgency align more clearly than in Europe. For now, the company is at capacity in the North Sea region — but, in his words, “the opportunity is obvious.”
Strategic Doctrine: The Return of the Builder State
Svanlund’s current intellectual project is Norway – The Builder State — a strategic doctrine arguing that prosperity and sovereignty rest on three pillars:
Conviction — shared belief in a purpose beyond comfort
Structure — institutions that enable coordination and scale
Resources — energy, materials, and productive labor
Democracy can be a powerful mechanism for aligning these pillars — but only when belief and competence are present. Without them, it becomes a machinery for distributing decline.
Thinker, Operator, Bridge-Builder
Svanlund’s essays and briefings attract attention from national security strategists, energy executives, and strategic investors across Europe and the U.S.
His online audience includes figures such as Brent Sadler, Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former U.S. Navy Commander, who has publicly reposted and engaged with his work. More notably, his work has resonated with former strategic planners in the U.S. National Security Council and senior advisors in defense-related industries, particularly on issues related to maritime resilience and industrial renewal.
His work has also resonated with senior private investors. David R. Sanchez, former Managing Director at Bear Stearns and equity partner at Zanbato, recently wrote:
“Andreas, your iconic and courageous combination of innovator, entrepreneur, visionary, and humanitarian is exhilarating.”
This combination of operational delivery, independent thinking, and multi-tier recognition places Svanlund in a rare position within European strategic discourse: not only diagnosing decline, but actively working on its reversal.
Closing Line
In an era marked by institutional paralysis and economic erosion, Andreas Svanlund stands out as a strategist aware of the material foundations of power — a practitioner who builds, a historian who listens, and a thinker who argues that sovereignty is not proclaimed — it is constructed.