page_title: Norwegian Coast Guard
section_title: Predecessors
hierarchical_section_title: Norwegian Coast Guard / History / Predecessors
caption_attribution_description: English: The Royal Norwegian Navy patrol boat HNoMS Nordkapp off Iceland.
context_page_description: The Norwegian Coast Guard is a maritime military force which is part of the Royal Norwegian Navy. The coast guard's responsibility are for fisheries inspection, customs enforcement, border control, law enforcement, shipping inspection, environmental protection, and search and rescue. It operates throughout Norway's 2,385,178-square-kilometer exclusive economic zone, internal waters and territorial waters. It is headquartered at Sortland Naval Base. In 2013 the Coast Guard had 370 employees, including conscripts, and a budget of 1.0 billion Norwegian krone.
  The force is subdivided into three main divisions. The Outer Coast Guard covers the EEZ and consists of three Nordkapp-class offshore patrol vessels, three Barentshav-class offshore patrol vessels as well as Ålesund, Svalbard and Harstad. The Inner Coast Guard consists of five Nornen-class patrol vessels. The Coast Guard has air support of the P-3 Orion patrol aircraft and Westland Lynx helicopters, both operated by the Royal Norwegian Air Force. The Westland Lynx is being phased out in Norwegian service, and replaced with the NH90.
context_section_description: Following the dissolution of the union between Norway and Sweden in 1905 there arose a debate concerning access to fishing in Norwegian territorial waters. The predominant concern was that Swedes were fishing in Norwegian waters. Norway declared a 4-nautical-mile (7 km; 5 mi) territorial water in 1906 and instructed the navy to take action against any foreign vessels fishing in those waters.
  The following year British fishing vessels started fishing along the coast of Finnmark. The fisheries inspection had an unarmed ship at the time, but asked for navy support. Eidsvold and Heimdal the following year was dispatched to aid. The first arrest of a foreign vessel took place in 1911 of a British trawler outside Varangerfjorden. The work was seasonal and was jointly financed by the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Fisheries. From 1914 it was entirely a military-funded operation. Later ships to participate were Farm and Valkyrje.
  From 1924 Michael Sars also participated in this work. The first dedicated coast guard vessel, Fridtjof Nansen, was commissioned in 1930. From 1937 it was supported by two smaller vessels, Nordkapp and Senja. Meanwhile, an espionage program was established to better locate illegal fisheries. All but Nordkapp were sunk in 1940 as part of the Second World War, although Senja was raised and repaired.
  After the end of the war, the fisheries surveillance services were reorganized. A number of whaling ships which had participated in the Arctic convoys were put into use as surveillance vessels while the navy focused on minesweeping. The surveillance was supplemented with Flower-class corvettes. Three used River-class frigates were taken into use in 1956, allowing Nordkapp to be decommissioned in 1956 and Senja two years later. The corvettes and later the frigates were used both for fisheries inspection and held in readiness for war. They, therefore, incurred high operational costs, were inefficient and had a large degree of conscripts.
  The Ministry of Fisheries appointed a committee in 1958 to consider the organization, and it concluded that the inspections should be a military affair. This led to the establishment of the Military Fisheries Surveillance, which consisted of three squadrons. Two were subordinate to the Navy Commands in Northern and Western Norway, respectively, while the third, serving the Oslofjord, was subordinate to the Oslo office. Meanwhile, work started on planning a new class of patrol vessels, which resulted in the commissioning of the Farm-class patrol vessel in 1962 and 1963. They were supplemented in 1964 by the used civilian Andenes-class patrol vessels.
caption: HNoMS Nordkapp off Iceland between 1940 and 1945
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