The Arctic Challenge in 2025 and Beyond
It's About Infrastructure
There are few places on earth that inspire equally wild fascination and misinformation like the Arctic. This is particularly true in the national security world. Trust me when I say that everyone who comes across the Arctic on a side quest gets a little twinkle in their eye and falls down a rabbit hole of research for several days. It’s like an unofficial initiation process into one of the most fascinating, remote problem sets in American and global security. It is a problem set driven more by the laws of nature than those of man, calling back to the days of exploration and imperialism before the defined order of 1945. This is not a uniquely American problem either, as the CCP has its own set of Arctic obsessives, the Russians consider themselves the preeminent Arctic nation, six other Arctic states now belong to NATO, and several temperate and tropical nations lobby to get a say in the economic action above 60 degrees north. This is to say nothing of the collective human fascination and affection for penguins in the Antarctic. The DoD Arctic Strategy published this past summer, but I suspect that there is going to be a renewed push for posture and policy changes in the Arctic. And so, I thought I’d break down exactly what our problems are and some ways to tackle them, without the hysteria. For the purposes of this article, I will focus on issues facing the North American Arctic.
Geography and Climate
The Arctic is a beautiful, hellish place. No matter what your policy interest, you have to understand that you are not operating or investing in the Mediterranean Sea. Geographically, the Arctic has several subregions composed of varying types of geology, weather patterns, wildlife, and indigenous cultures. The Arctic of Scandinavia or Russia is not the Arctic of the Alaskan North Slope. Lines of communication at sea and ashore can vary wildly year to year and even within the calendar year. The cost of hydrocarbon and mineral extraction is high short of major supply chain crises elsewhere, and even then that high extraction cost makes long-term investment by corporations a difficult risk to write off without long-term state backing (like PRC-RU joint ventures). For its residents, the cost of everything runs high from vegetables to fuel to heat homes. GPS and other satellite resources function poorly at high latitudes, and basic infrastructure like paved roads, waste removal, and reliable emergency response personnel are a lot harder to come by. In American Arctic communities, climate change threatens to drown coastal towns and dry up Salmon populations for which the people rely on for commerce and sustenance. There may come a time soon when the USG is faced with a choice of investing to protect Alaskan coastlines from flooding with expensive barriers or invest in relocation for the coastal populations (this is also a likely threat to the people of Southern Louisiana and other low-lying populations). Oh, and then there’s the exploding methane pockets.
Resource Extraction and Territory
The Arctic is a live, lethal experiment in the collision of climate change and human commercial evolution. As climate change destroys the livelihoods of the indigenous Arctic peoples, it opens new opportunities for outside investors (and potentially to save the indigenous economies.) Tourism is the most ready commercial option, with a new Arctic cruise through the Northwest passage now running in the summer months (at some tens of thousands of dollars per ticket). Then there are the more traditional resource extraction industries for hydrocarbons, rare earth minerals, timber, fish, and ores. Despite decades of political posturing, resource extraction is not easy and cheap in the Arctic. It is not a quick business success nor is it a solution for America’s energy or industrial woes. We are now the world’s largest hydrocarbon exporter, which makes additional extraction not worth the investment in such a harsh place with long supply lines and uneasy political support. Rare earth extraction and traditional ore mining is easier to invest in (the North and West slopes already have seasonal mining operations), the problem is that the raw materials are often then shipped off to the PRC or elsewhere to be refined. Thus, this extraction makes us no more secure if we cannot refine these materials at home or in a friendly nation. Overfishing is a real threat to the Arctic ecosystem, and what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic. Moreover, climate change is making entire species disappear or relocate that it threatens the stability of the Arctic economy today. Finally, these raw materials are most often transported by ship through the Bering Strait, thus leaving them vulnerable to interruption in a time of war to commerce raiding unless we can dedicate substantial resources to their defense. The Port of Anchorage is a singular point of failure and risk for the Alaskan people and American commerce, bringing in and sending out a large swath of critical supplies and resources. Resource extraction in Canada has fewer infrastructure problems than Alaska, but Greenland faces the same if not even more hurdles to actual, reasonable investment risk and ROI. On that note, building traditional infrastructure from housing to bunkers can be a challenge due to melting permafrost. To keep it simple, when the ground thaws it can not only cause the soil to shift, it can force structures upward. This is why when you build basements in temperate environments in the US for your houses, you have to consider the depth to which the ground will freeze in the winter.
If you think resource extraction is costly, then think about the insurance market. The insurance market for everything from oil platforms to massive container ships is hardly low for the Arctic even in peacetime, and while its getting cheaper, its not yet overcoming other chokepoints like the Suez and Malacca Strait for route priority. There’s very little resourcing available for securing or recovering ships in the event of calamity, and the cost of an environmental catastrophe in the remote Arctic still looms large with minimal true policies in place to manage clean up logistics. Nobody wants the ship they own or insure to become the next household name like the Exxon Valdez. There are three famous routes through the Arctic that grow a little more available every year. These are often pointed to as the new South China Sea routes by champions of Arctic investment. The opportunity for large scale traffic flow is not there yet, but just because it may take another decade or so for the scales to flip doesn’t mean we shouldn’t invest in the supporting infrastructure today. Industrial policy is back, if you can stomach it.
Operations in the Arctic
So now that you have the basic geographic and economic layout of the Arctic, let’s talk about the military and security factors that shape and are shaped by the High North.
The Arctic technically belongs to three US commands. EUCOM owns Greenland because Denmark manages Greenland and our Scandinavian friends belong to EUCOM. NORTHCOM/NORAD owns Canada and Alaska, and INDOPACOM has interests in Alaska-based units because of their response time to a major contingency (war) in the Western Pacific. This setup is super annoying, but it is what we have to work with and I’ll be honest the power sharing agreement we have here is better than setting up a new Arctic four-star command on par with NORTHCOM. I would prefer we not build another backwater bureaucracy and the theater-level Alaska Command that falls subordinate to the combatant commands works just fine.
The preeminent forces for the Arctic are a bit wonky. The Coast Guard does a lot of day to day work from law enforcement to scientific research support (and they own our icebreakers). The Army trains in the Arctic but the quality of those forces for actual Arctic operations is undergoing an overhaul. Light airborne infantry and SOF are the name of the game here. National Guard troops also play a big role in search and rescue. The Air Force/Space Force have a lot of stake in the Arctic both because of the need to track and intercept missiles and aircraft aimed at the Homeland and because of the early warning site and ground communications relay at Pituffik Space Force Base in Greenland. The Marines have a rotating presence in Norway, but beyond that they’re busy elsewhere. Absent here is the Navy, but not really. The Navy’s operations in the Arctic are largely silent because they belong to the silent service (our submarines) hunting other submarines and conducting deterrence patrols.
The Russians and PRC meanwhile have wildly different postures in the Arctic. The Russians invested a lot in infrastructure, equipment, and troops of the Arctic in the 2010s. Then they ran them into a sledgehammer in Eastern Ukraine. The resulting need to rebuild the Russian Army in the middle of a war and salvage the bleeding Russian economy bought us some breathing room to improve our Arctic posture without needing to panic. However, it also opened the door for the CCP to leverage its investment in the Russian war machine to push for greater access to the Arctic both in terms of investment in resource ventures and for joint maritime security agreements. Previously the Russians were super opposed to PRC presence in the Arctic at any level but their hand was forced by their own stupidity.
The PRC meanwhile has a long way to go before it establishes a military presence in the Arctic or before it can even maintain long-range patrols up North, but they are trying. In the past, the PRC has tried through various state-backed corporations to buy up land and access in the Arctic and most often they have failed (including in Greenland). Nobody, not even the Russians, wants them up there and everyone (especially with a little pressure) has been pretty good about keeping them out until recent. Keeping them from buying up land is one thing, keeping out their scientists is a lot harder but a manageable risk for now. The point is that both the RU and PRC threat in the Arctic is manageable right now, but we ignore the region at our own peril to only one day wakeup with a very different reality under the midnight sun.
Much like resource extraction, it is costly to maintain a large-scale military presence in the Arctic. It’s certainly much easier on land than at sea, but none of it is particularly easy. In terms of basing, just like on the Pacific islands, it is an expensive and temperamental endeavor: construction materials are pricey with long delivery times, and building “to code” costs a lot more in the harsh climate. Now, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t expand basing in our Arctic and even in Greenland. There are a lot of sensing and air cover gaps and I would rather have a few extra barebones airfields and bases available for surge capacity than to be stuck without adequate operational support in a crisis.
For maritime operations, the only real port the US has in the Arctic is at Pituffik and that is for the purpose of…seasonally resupplying the base, not supporting a DDG squadron. Airbases and airfields are easier to maintain and build, but the shifting ground from melting permafrost can challenge design reliability (this is a threat to all infrastructure in the Arctic that isn’t built with ground shifting in mind). Everything is harder in the Arctic, except dying. If you want a new port in the Arctic, you can’t just dredge next to a coastal town. You probably have to build all the supporting infrastructure line road and rail lines and power lines to support it (as is the case with the Port of Nome). Basing in the Arctic matters for everything from early warning for nuclear missile strikes to fighting the PLA in the Western Pacific. Commercial viability or not, USG investment in Arctic infrastructure can’t be pushed off.
If You Build It
Politics aside, ambitions like buying Greenland do little to change our strategic posture in the Arctic. It’s still NATO soil and we already have basing there. This is to say nothing of the benefit of the Danes paying for the costs of managing Greenland where we don’t have to. It would be one thing if the people of Greenland were voting to leave Danish rule, but they are not (yet). The rest of our Arctic territory explains exactly why it won’t change anything: if you don’t invest in infrastructure then it doesn’t make us any more secure or wealthy. We’re already far behind on securing our present Arctic territories. Remember that of the 8 Arctic nations, 7 belong to NATO and the other is Russia. If we want to make the Arctic a priority for 2025 and beyond, we should consider the following:
-Invest in our science agencies. Climate science isn’t just for studying climate change, it matters for everything from commercial exploration to submarine navigation. These agencies need more collection vehicles, sensors, and funding for research.
-Research and build climate-resilient infrastructure. This goes for everything from military bases to commercial ports and seawalls. Climate mitigation isn’t just about carbon capture, it’s about mitigating the damage to our people and infrastructure that is already underway in the Arctic. The lessons learned early in the Arctic could pay dividends elsewhere in the world, but the lessons will hit first in the Arctic.
-Lean heavy on unmanned systems. The Arctic is a harsh place for people and machines, but the supply lines for machines are a lot shorter than for manned systems and they can endure a lot more. The North American Arctic coastline and waters are a lot of ground to cover and persistent sensing is going to require large investments in new systems. We only have so many resources, and while the Arctic is a long term priority, it is not THE priority. The INDOPACOM and EUCOM theaters still (rightfully) take priority for the limited number of big grey hulls.
-Expand the shipbuilding industrial base. This is already partially underway thanks to a US-Finland-Canada memorandum on a joint venture to build new icebreakers. This is a huge opportunity and might not only help kickstart the icebreaker fleet but also make the whole US shipbuilding industry more resilient by generating more long-term demand for skilled workers.
-Expand US refinery capacity for raw materials like rare earths and other ores. Extracting resources from the Arctic only works if the CCP doesn’t have access to the supply chain, otherwise we’re just making it easier for them at the expense of national security for a few corporations to make some cash.
-Rather than pursue territorial annexation with extremely risky investment ROI, negotiate for additional basing in Greenland. It supports American and NATO security in the North Atlantic while minimizing the cost to US taxpayers and to our public image and relations with our European partners.
-Expand SOF training for the Arctic and dedicate an SF battalion to Arctic operations out of JBER. If you want to fight in the Arctic, you have to live in it. The most likely scenarios for Arctic combat operations for land forces demand a light footprint and Arctic-conditioned training and endurance. The ability to target and conduct reconnaissance, sabotage, and other SF missions in the Arctic requires an intensive familiarity with the environment, people, and logistics of the Arctic.
Conclusion
The Arctic is an alluring problem set for the investor and national security leader, it is also deadly. The Arctic is a slow burn and we need to build policy and infrastructure for it that takes that timeline into account. The Arctic may not be a global crisis today, but when it becomes one, it’ll be too late to start preparing. If you want the Arctic to be profitable, if you want the US to remain dominant and deter incursions and threats from the High North, if you want to be able to respond to and protect the Arctic from environmental catastrophe or even if you just want the indigenous Arctic peoples to live their lives in the way they want to…you have to build the infrastructure to make it happen from seawalls and roads to airfields and research stations. Land unused, facilities neglected, or alliances weakened by infighting does not make the Arctic more secure. Nothing new happens in the Arctic without a lot of money, relationship-building, and a willingness to think about ROI in terms of decades instead of the next election cycle. In other words, the Arctic is an infrastructure problem.
If you would like to read more about the future of US-China conflict or what happens when climate change shapes our battlefields, check out my novel, EX SUPRA, about the world after the fall of Taiwan, an isolationist and hyper partisan America, and World War III. It was nominated for a Prometheus Award for best science fiction novel and there’s a sequel in the works! If you have any suggestions for topics for future newsletters, please send them my way on Twitter @Iron_Man_Actual and on BlueSky @tonystark.bsky.social. And don’t forget to subscribe!