Germany Is Building Tanks in Norway Again. This Time, Norway Invited Them

A new Leopard 2A8 production line in Levanger looks routine. But put it next to the submarines, sub-hunting planes, and a polar spaceport, and Berlin and Oslo are quietly building a northern alliance

Norwegian soldiers conduct an operational demonstration with the Leopard 2A8 battle tank for external media agencies as part of Exercise Joint Viking 25 on Setermoen Training Area, Setermoen, Norway, March 8, 2025. The exercise involved US soldiers, Marines, and personnel from Norway, the Netherlands, Finland, Germany, Denmark, and Great Britain. It focused on developing cold-weather skills and promoting cooperation among Allied forces. (US Army photo by Spc. Sar Paw)

Hey friends, some interesting news from Norway and Germany for our paid subscriber piece today. Let’s start in World War II:

On January 16, 1942, the German battleship Tirpitz slipped into Fættenfjorden, a narrow arm of the Trondheimsfjord on the border between Stjørdal and Levanger in central Norway.

For the next 21 months, the most feared warship in the Kriegsmarine sat in that little fjord under camouflage netting and anti-aircraft guns, while the Royal Air Force kept trying to sink her.

The RAF attacked four times, lost 17 aircraft and 64 airmen, and barely scratched the paint.

A recognition drawing of Tirpitz prepared by the US Navy for pilots. Public domain

Two years before that, on April 21, 1940, German troops came ashore at Verdal, the next town up the fjord from Levanger, to outflank the British and Norwegian forces trying to hold the line north of Trondheim.

That stretch of shoreline spent the next five years under German occupation.

Now, on October 15 of this year, German tank maker KNDS and its Norwegian partner Ritek began building Leopard 2A8 main battle tanks in Levanger.

I’ll admit that when this headline first crossed my desk, I almost skipped it.

“Foreign defense contractor opens assembly line in customer country” is about as exciting as watching grass grow. Plus, offset deals like this happen constantly, because countries like to keep some of the jobs when they spend billions on foreign hardware.

But the more I read, the more I realized I was looking at a single brick in bigger wall:

Germany and Norway are binding their militaries together at a speed that would have been hard to imagine five years ago, from tank factories in Trøndelag, to submarine maintenance yards near Bergen, to sub-hunting aircraft patrolling the gap between Greenland and Scotland.

And the country doing the binding is the same one that showed up uninvited on this coastline 86 years ago.

A tank factory with a diving pool

Let’s start with the tanks, because Norway’s road to this factory was actually surprisingly bumpy.

In February 2023, Norway announced it would buy 54 Leopard 2A8s for about 19.7 billion kroner, roughly $1.9 billion at the time, to replace its aging Leopard 2A4 fleet.

(Fun fact: Occasionally I’ll get a “Super Thanks” on a YouTube video from the same guy in Norway. It’s essentially a one-time tip for people who want to send money without becoming full members. Anyways, I’ve become very good at mentally converting kroner or NOK to US dollars in my head.)

The Leopard beat out South Korea’s K2 Black Panther after head-to-head trials. The decision came after a pretty public fight inside the Norwegian military. The chief of defense, Gen. Eirik Kristoffersen, had openly argued that the money would be better spent on helicopters and long-range precision fires, and that tanks might not survive a battlefield full of drones and anti-tank missiles.

Other senior officers pushed back hard, and the old school tank camp won.

That debate hasn’t gone away, by the way.