In the High North, the most important advantage is not firepower—it is staying present long enough to notice small, deniable interference before it becomes strategic damage. That need is driving the Arctic defense planners toward unmanned aircraft, surface craft and underwater vehicles designed to survive, rather than to be innovative.
In a Center of European Policy Analysis briefing, analysts put the Arctic in terms of an operating space where the “quiet” threat is not always territorial, but is typically maritime and infrastructural. Jan Kallberg, a senior fellow specializing in transatlantic security, stated that a ground threat in the near future is limited by the geographical circumstances but a maritime disruption is a viable way to attack by an opponent. I regard it primarily as a naval danger. They are out to destroy cables, Kallberg said, citing cable sabotage issues that have already come to dominate NATO thinking in surrounding seas.
Such cables are not a niche vulnerability. The communications infrastructure of the modern economy traverses the seabeds and over 95 percent of the global internet traffic is transported by subsea fiber. The issue is exacerbated in the Arctic and North Atlantic: due to the lack of repair resources, long routes, and a limited weather window that concentrates maintenance within only a few seasons of the year. Here, the idea of the unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) is discussed not as an offensive facility but rather as a constant guardian of cable corridors and anomalies investigation along with the documentary trail of data when the question is who owns the attribution.
Maj. Gen. Gordon Davis stressed on the simplicity and logistic rather than flashy value proposition. Davis said that this is what makes uncrewed systems important in the High North not because they represent a revolutionary step but because they allow persistence in what is actually unfeasible when it comes to continuous human presence.
It is an engineering battle with the Arctic, however, one of persistence. Low temperatures wear out batteries, mechanical systems freeze up, and the geometry of the area and interference costs make navigation and timing poor. A system working in temperate waters might fail when there is a combination of temperatures, darkness, and icing. Such a technical fact drives the demand of such features as battery cases, redundant navigation, and communications plans that are not based on continuous satellite coverage. Its operational objective is not so much as perfect autonomy but predictable availability – platforms capable of loitering, capturing, and transferring targets or anomalies to crewed platforms before weather losses are incurred.
New working poses also make it clear that endurance is important. Life cycle U.S. Coast Guard has claimed to be the sole U.S. surface presence in the arctic, which is constricting and renders scalable sensing and cueing devices more useful than single-platform patrol ability. Unmanned systems are viewed as an option to expand the area of the ocean that is searchable, keep in touch over the long distance, and minimize breaks to allow the so-called research activity to creep into the area of infrastructure and remain unnoticed.
It is growing a parallel track underneath the waterline: turning cables themselves into sensors. It is proposed to install “SMART Cables,” which entail environmental monitoring into subsea telecom infrastructure, including sensors to detect disturbances that are indicative of human activity. This has a dual-use meaning science and hazard warning as well as enhancing awareness of the maritime domain by making it more difficult to hide tampering with it. In an area where “hybrids” pressure is determined by ambiguity, instrumenting the seabed decreases the area of an unacknowledged interference.
It is not the lack of drones or sensors in a vacuum that is a persistent struggle. The point of contention is to spin them into common command-and-control and data standards and trans-boundary sustainment in such a way that unmanned platforms can predictively provide cues. In the Arctic, the autonomy payoff is determined in hours on station and attribution clarity- engineering results that are significant long before a crisis gets out of control.
