Take Your Globe & Tilt it Towards You 90 degrees

...and then let's talk about the Arctic..

First things first, as it is the focus of the report, let’s go to the chart room and properly define the, “Central Arctic Ocean.”

There it is, the horizontally shaded bit outside everyone’s EEZ.

The chart comes from the report in question by RAND: The Future of Maritime Presence in the Central Arctic Ocean.

Before we dive in—and the Front Porch knows exactly where I am going here—I need to point out again what we see at the very top where all the red, green, and blue lines intersect. You can’t miss it, and it should have you screaming to whatever direction The Pentagon is from where you sit.

Yes kiddies, that is the Bering Strait, half of which is ours, and the other side is Russia. As you move from the Arctic into the greater Pacific or from the Pacific to the Arctic, you have to pass through that strait, and before it the American Aleutian Islands.

As we’ve covered here before, we have criminally avoided leveraging the blessings of the geography bequeathed to our nation, that of controlling both the inner and outer gates to the Arctic Ocean from the Pacific.

I should not have to explain to you the importance of the Arctic shores of Alaska to anyone. Challengers to the security of our resources in the north, both old and new, are back on the scene. We are a decade late in building a base a Nome and reactivating Adak. I covered that in a previous Substack linked in the prior sentence. Read it and come back if you need to catch up.

A weakness of much of the RAND report is, it is mostly based on stale talking points about immediate climate change in the Arctic, and questionably alarmist assumptions about the Arctic climate for the rest of the century, which seem more suited to the first Obama Administration, but put this to the side.

Should the climate in the Arctic mid-century trend towards the more ice or less, the simple facts remain—the competition in the Arctic is only increasing and the time to act on this new reality is now.

Let’s focus on Chapter 3: Military and Security-Based Use of the Central Arctic Ocean.

As access to the Arctic increases, threats emerge that compel investments by Arctic states to protect their interests in the region. Historically, U.S. military and security efforts have focused on the North American Arctic because of Alaska’s interconnection with economic activity in the Bering Sea, as well as air and subsurface threats in the region. National defense threats to European Arctic states and their investments are primarily driven by their proximity to Russia. The accession of Sweden and Finland to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has multiplied the obligations of NATO Arctic states in the event of conflict. Moreover, the U.S. Department of Defense sees China as a potentially destabilizing force in the region.

Furthermore, any increased commercial activities in the CAO—such as those described in the previous chapter—will likely drive an increase in government activity to ensure the security and safety of people, assets, and infrastructure. Much of this activity will include enforcing governance and a rules-based order to include maritime law enforcement and environmental protection, SAR, protection of subsea infrastructure, and other security requirements. In this chapter, we identify drivers and barriers to increased future security activity in the CAO through analysis of publicly available academic and policy literature and strategic documents of Arctic states and China.

Look at the call to action there, “…maritime law enforcement and environmental protection, SAR, protection of subsea infrastructure, and other security requirements.”

That means more US Coast Guard—and better armed US Coast Guard—in the Arctic, and the US Navy at sea and in the air, need to up its game.

As I’ve written before, Nome and Adak are a minimum. Dutch Harbor/Unalaska as well. Establish, reactivate, expand. We need more than just icebreakers, we need ice-hardened frigates/OPV. Other, smaller nations with fewer resources or requirements have them, so should we.

Military activity in the Arctic is on an upward trend. From 2015 to 2023, Russian military exercises in the Arctic have grown in frequency and moved farther north, shifting from the Norwegian Sea to the Barents Sea to bolster the Northern Fleet’s bastion defense. Simultaneously, Western-led multinational Arctic exercises involving non-Arctic nations have also increased in number. From 2006 to 2019, such exercises rose from one per year to four per year. There have been instances of tensions between U.S. fishing vessels and Russian military conducting exercises in the U.S. EEZ.

As the Arctic attracts more commercial and security activity, Arctic states will want to meet presence with presence. For the United States, a major incentive to increase such presence has been the still-limited but growing military and security activities that China started conducting in the Arctic. Chinese military ships have been observed crossing through the Bering Sea on multiple occasions.

In October 2024, China and Russia conducted a first joint Arctic patrol of their coast guards that passed through the Bering Strait. In response, the U.S. Coast Guard dispatched aircraft and cutters to observe the Chinese and Russian ships. Despite these operations being limited in nature, they suggest that China is intent on demonstrating presence in the Arctic and near U.S. territory.

In our three decades of strategic distraction and slumber, we have willfully forgotten what our early Cold War ancestors knew and prepared for.

Look at how well armed the WWII era Wind Class icebreakers were for their time. All our arctic ships should be comparably armed for today’s standards, with at least the armament of an European OPV like the Italian Thaon di Revel-class OPV as a baseline.

This is not a new challenge, nor a new requirement. We just have had successive leaders push it to the right, towards the “out-years.”

The out-years are now.