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LISBON, Portugal—Denmark could be the next country to join NATO’s Multinational Multirole Tanker Transport Unit (MMU) following a recommendation to enter the initiative by the country’s defense chief.
Copenhagen is to initiate negotiations to join the Netherlands-led unit, which currently flies nine Airbus A330 Multi-Role Tanker Transport (MRTT) aircraft on behalf of Belgium, the Czech Republic, Germany, Luxembourg and Norway.
Denmark wishes to purchase flight hours from the MMU that would correspond to adding another two A330 MRTTs to the unit, the Danish Ministry of Defense announced March 25. Participation in the MMU is valued at 7.4 billion Danish krone ($1.07 billion) between 2025-2033.
“It [the MMU] is a capacity that will strengthen the air defense of Denmark and the Kingdom and increase the combat power of the Danish defense including our national operational needs,” Danish Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen says. “The aerial refueling capacity, for example, creates the prerequisites for operations with fighter aircraft in the Arctic and the North Atlantic. Furthermore, there is good potential for Nordic cooperation in the area.”
The move to join the MMU follows Denmark’s landmark decision to radically increase defense spending with a $7 billion fund to rapidly expand the combat power of the Danish armed forces. The move comes as Washington is not only calling for Europe to spend more on defense but also ratcheting up rhetoric around Greenland, the self-governing Danish territory that the Trump administration has been eyeing due to its reserves of critical minerals and its strategic location in the Arctic.
Access to the tankers would allow Denmark to deploy fighters to Greenland more quickly, if required. Previously the only way to deploy fighters to Greenland was to rely on American tanker support or island hop via Iceland. The latter was put to the test during deployments of F-16s to the island in 2014 and 2015.
More recently, the Danish government has announced plans to modernize Greenland airfields to enable them to potentially accommodate combat aircraft. The MMU is due to receive one more aircraft in 2027 to build the fleet to 10. But last August procurement documents revealed that the NATO Support and Procurement Agency (NSPA), which manages the MMU program, was planning to acquire another three MRTT aircraft, snapping up the last available A330-200-based MRTTs before Airbus transitions to an aircraft based on the A330-800neo.
The MMU originally was formed from a European Defense Agency initiative to create a fleet of pooled and shared tankers to boost the number of tanker aircraft available to Europe’s air forces. It was formed by the Netherlands and Luxembourg, which took the first step in creating a multinational tanker squadron by acquiring two A330 MRTTs. The other nations have joined by acquiring flight hours, and aircraft have been procured correspondingly. The largest contributor, Germany, acquired 5,500 annual flying hours, requiring the fleet to expand by five aircraft.
The MMU’s MRTTs are based at Eindhoven in the Netherlands and Cologne-Bonn Airport in Germany.
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