Anders Puck Nielsen

The chapter examines the lessons from the Danish contribution to a hospital ship in the Korean War. This specific operation has become one of the most famous maritime efforts in Danish public awareness in the 20th century, with the ship Jutlandia becoming the topic of pop music and national myth-making. Even 70 years later, most Danes would be able to place the ship and the mission in history, and Jutlandia has created a personalised connection between the Danes and the Korean War. The chapter demonstrates that a relatively small maritime contribution has the potential to establish lasting memories if the right factors are present. These factors are identified and explained in terms of a combination of naval diplomacy theory and small-state politics in the Cold War. This shows why the Jutlandia mission, in hindsight, looks so successful from a Danish perspective, but also that the image of the mission today is highly romanticised. In reality, the Danish politicians were driven by a desire to find the cheapest possible contribution that would be deemed acceptable by the United States without actually offering direct military support. This turned out to be the deployment of a hospital ship. This knowledge is used for a discussion about the particulars of naval diplomacy and how naval planners can understand various categories of stakeholders in naval diplomacy operations.

This chapter uses recent operational history of the Royal Danish Navy as a case study into the particular challenges that small navies face. Denmark provides a useful lens because the long counter-piracy mission from 2008–2015 consumed a substantial amount of the navy’s collective warfighting resources. The experience was that it was impossible to maintain a sufficient level of warfighting skills while also committing so many resources to a maritime policing operation. From the literature on small navies it is identified that they typically struggle with problems related to critical mass of materiel, maintaining a sufficient training and education system, limited bureaucratic strength, and a tendency of their leaders to be over-ambitious. It is shown that the requirement to prioritize resources has enticed the Danish Navy to find innovative solutions, but that in the process some choices may have led to an unconscious acceptance of lower standards and disregard for the complexity of less prestigious tasks.