What will become of warming oceans that transform the Arctic as a fringe of the map into an operating field and yet the United States has not the ships, ports, cold depths to stay there. A grim foreshadowing has already been provided by NATO training and wargaming. Multinational winter exercise-related allied evaluations saw Arctic competence concentrate in Europe, with British and Scandinavian units routinely excelling in the tasks that are of greatest importance at the time of low temperatures and the loss of daylight: mobility, sustainment, and command-and-control over friction.
One military source explained that during Joint Viking in north Norway, leadership of the exercise had to step in after the Finnish reservists defeated the American troops: “Exercise commanders had to ask Finnish reservists, the most formidable Arctic warriors, who were playing the role of invaders in the war games, to go easy on the Americans,” the military source said. “The Finns had to be told to stop beating the Americans as it was embarrassing and demoralising for them.” The inappropriateness is not merely regarding snow skills. It represents decades of European experience in the High North operating and a U.S. force posture developed in other theaters and does not make Arctic readiness a long-term discipline but a special, intermittent one.
In the mean time, there is a physical environment that is evolving at a faster scale that condenses planning cycles. The Navy even had a 2009 Arctic Road Map that warned that the Arctic would be experiencing “ice-free” summers within decades and stated,“The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe,” and anticipating “nearly ice-free summers sometime in the 2030s.” Recent scientific attempts further supported the speed of melting away summer sea ice, as scientists cited processes, including melt ponds, which increase the seasonal melt, and put an ice-free summer inside the mid-2030s range.
These changes have been followed over the years by the Pentagon and research investments reflect it. Massive operations in the marginal ice zone were carried out by the Office of Naval Research, with robotic systems and sensors to enhance the predictability and safety in the transition zone between ice and open ocean. Dr. Martin Jeffries is certain that the extent of the Arctic sea ice is shrinking. Several data sources, such as autonomous underwater gliders, ice-measuring buoys and satellite images of the Marginal Ice Zone, were employed to assist in comprehending the reasons why the ice is receding. The market logic is simple: enhanced environmental forecasting insurers all the way up to flight schedules to hull risk to search and rescue insurance.
Practically, though, prediction is not the equivalent of presence. The United States possesses over 1000 miles of Arctic coast, but its access issue has been recalcitrant; the power to break ice. Currently, the Coast Guard has three icebreaking ships capable of operating in the Arctic, the Russian fleet is much larger, and they maintain regular operations in the Northern Sea Route. This effort by Washington to seal that divide now incorporates a strategy to increase medium icebreaking capability through a relationship that is aimed at delivering 11 Arctic Security Cutters. The dependency is not less evident in that direction: the first production line is based on Finnish shipbuilding expertise, with a clear focus on moving the skills back to U.S. shipyards.
Exercises are also adapting to the same reality. The U.S. involvement in Cold Response planning in Norway has been structured around winter constraints deployment and integration, and the maritime and air inputs have been planned to enhance surveillance and coordination within the Nordic operating box. The exercise is designed to emphasize the banal yet conclusive matters, like fuel, service schedules, road systems, cold, and its impact on electronics, instead of Arctic operations being a branding game.
The implication of the High North does not mean that the United States does not have efficient units; it merely means that the U.S. system has difficulties in scaling the Arctic operations into a permanent stance. Ships need homeporting, dockage, crews, maintenance pipelines, and foreseeable training schedules. Those muscles have been developed by Arctic allies because of necessity. In the case of the United States, the operating environment remains open; and the set of capabilities is still being assembled.
