- Hubbert
- Mar 25, 2007
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At a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
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I haven't been able to shake the topic of the future of the Arctic theatre from my mind, so it's time for a book dump.
Welcome to the Biosphere Collapse / The US will lose WW3 thread crossover.
All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon's Perspective on Climate Change, Michael T. Klare -- Note: Published in 2019 posted:
Chapter Five - GREAT-POWER CLASHES
The Melting Arctic and Other Conflict Zones
In March 2016, some three thousand American military personnel joined twelve thousand soldiers from other NATO countries in Exercise Cold Response, the largest multinational maneuvers conducted in Europe’s Far North since the end of the Cold War. The exercise, sponsored by the Norwegian military, was intended to enhance the fighting skills of combat units in Norway’s near-Arctic environment. Conducted over several weeks in snow-covered mountain ranges near the port city of Trondheim, Cold Response 2016 featured large-scale armored engagements between allied defenders and an unidentified “aggressor” force.1 The underlying strategic scenario for the exercise was not made public by U.S. officials at the scene, but it is not hard to reconstruct the gist of the plan from comments made by participating officers—and to conclude that the mock aggressor force was unmistakably Russian.
In the exercise scenario, the invading force entered Norway from positions above the Arctic Circle (Norway and Russia share a 122-mile land border at the extreme northern tip of Scandinavia) and made their way down toward populated areas in the south. Norway’s small army managed to slow the invaders’ advance, providing time for allied forces to stream in from bases elsewhere in Europe and in the United States. At that point in the scenario, hundreds of U.S. Marines conducted amphibious landings along Norway’s coastal fjords while others flew to airstrips inland, picking up heavy weapons already prepositioned in large caves there before moving toward the battle zone. The arriving Americans then joined with Norwegian forces and other allied troops to overpower the invaders.2
While similar in many ways to other multinational exercises conducted throughout the year by the United States and NATO, Exercise Cold Response 2016 was unique in several significant ways. To begin with, of course, there was the sub-Arctic terrain in which it took place. The Norwegian training site was specifically chosen to acquaint American and allied soldiers—most of whose combat experience had been in the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan—with the distinctive challenges of fighting in snow-covered, subzero conditions. “This exercise in particular was meant to get us out of our own home plate or back yard and operating in an area where we’re not very familiar,” said Marine Colonel Will Bentley. “We’ve been doing a lot of desert operations and operations in other areas. We have not operated in this extreme cold nor in Norway … in a [sic] quite a while.”3
The exercise also highlighted a largely unknown feature of U.S. planning for possible combat with Russian forces in the Far North: the fact that the U.S. Department of Defense is storing vast quantities of military matériel in climate-controlled caves in Norway’s mountainous interior for potential use by American forces. This program, initiated during the Cold War, was substantially expanded in 2014, when the Norwegian government gave the DoD the right to store advanced M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks in the caves, along with other heavy combat systems. The cave complex now contains enough tanks, artillery pieces, and other equipment to sustain a Marine Corps Air-Ground Task Force of some fifteen thousand combatants for thirty days of intense combat. Norwegian personnel maintain the equipment with the understanding that, if Norway were to be invaded, American troops would be flown into the area and use those weapons to help defend the country.4
Beyond practicing the retrieval of that heavy equipment and familiarizing American soldiers with the harsh conditions of Norway’s Far North, Exercise Cold Response 2016 fulfilled another major goal: to signal to Russia and other major powers that the United States regards the Arctic as an important site of geopolitical contestation. The Arctic had, of course, been accorded considerable strategic significance during the Cold War era, when U.S. and Russian bombers and missiles were expected to fly over the North Pole while on nuclear attack missions—prompting both sides to establish radar sites and air bases there—but it had received little attention from military planners since then. More recently, however, the region has again attracted close attention, as allied strategists began contemplating the potential for clashes with Russia all along its western periphery. Believing that a time might come when fighting will erupt in or near the Arctic, American and NATO officials started taking steps to prepare their forces for combat in that unforgiving environment.
The few details provided regarding the scenario for Exercise Cold Response 2016 say little about the geopolitical backdrop for the simulated confrontation. But from the nature of U.S. training operations and other indications, it is very clear that American military officials are seriously contemplating the possibility of great-power combat occurring in the Arctic region—arising not just as an extension of a clash erupting elsewhere in Europe but independently, as a consequence of developments in the Arctic itself. Because of the rapidly melting Arctic ice cap, this once inaccessible area has become open to oil drilling and other economic activities—an opening that has sparked the interest of many Arctic-facing nations, Russia most of all. As it has moved ever deeper into the Arctic in search of energy reserves to develop, Russia has also undertaken a major military buildup in the region, producing considerable anxiety for Norway and other U.S. allies.5
Significantly, the 2016 exercise assumed that the invading force entered Norway from its northern border with Russia, an area adjacent to the Kola Peninsula and a major concentration of Russian forces. Russia’s Northern Fleet, a mainstay of its naval power, is based at Murmansk, only about seventy-five miles from that border. Murmansk was a bastion of Soviet strength during the Cold War era, housing ballistic missile submarines and other critical assets; it fell into decay following the USSR’s collapse, but has been revived in recent years under President Vladimir Putin’s patronage. Declaring the Arctic to be of vital importance to Russia’s future economic strength, Putin created a new strategic command for the Arctic in 2014 and ordered the construction of new and expanded bases in the Kola Peninsula.6
In the view of U.S. strategists, the escalation of NATO-Russia tensions in Central Europe remains the most likely source of a great-power confrontation in Scandinavia. However, as the Arctic’s hydrocarbon reserves become ever more accessible, states may clash directly over access to those resources, setting the stage for battle. In 2016, the DoD told Congress that while this scenario is unlikely in the short term, it will become more likely when the Arctic ice cap begins to disappear. “In the mid- to far-term, as ice recedes and resource extraction technology improves, competition for economic advantage and a desire to exert influence over an area of increasing geostrategic importance could lead to increased tension,” the DoD stated. “These economic and security concerns may increase the risk of disputes between Arctic and non-Arctic nations over access to Arctic shipping lanes and natural resources.”7
As we shall see, the Arctic could prove to be the first region of the world in which climate change plays a direct role in provoking conflict among the major powers. Although it may seem distant from the main centers of great-power confrontation, the polar region is encircled by Russia, the United States, and four other NATO members—Canada, Denmark (responsible for Greenland’s defense), Iceland, and Norway. All of those countries have demonstrated an interest in exploiting the Arctic’s hydrocarbon resources, and all except Iceland have commenced or announced plans to bolster their military capabilities there. China, though not an Arctic nation, has also expressed an interest in exploiting the region’s resources, and is building icebreakers to facilitate such activities.8 As this competition intensifies, the risk of conflict is bound to grow. And while the Arctic may prove to be the first site of climate-related great-power clashes, it is unlikely to be the last: other areas of the world harboring critical resources, especially water, will also be subject to warming’s powerful impacts, and they, too, could experience wars among the major powers.
For the U.S. military, any great-power war arising from the impacts of global warming—whether involving the United States as a belligerent or not—would represent a significant leap up the ladder of escalation. Once such a conflict erupted, the pace and outcome of events would of course be largely decided by conventional military factors, such as the balance of forces on each side. Meanwhile, having triggered the conflict, climate change could also play a significant role in how it unfolds. In the Arctic, for example, an increasingly ice-free sea expanse would permit naval maneuvers not previously conceivable; for conflicts erupting elsewhere, higher temperatures could impede the performance of both machines and personnel.
No matter how the fighting progresses, any such war—like any conflict among the great powers—is certain to produce widespread death and destruction, with an unpredictable outcome. Always hovering in the background, moreover, is the prospect of nuclear weapons use and resulting catastrophe. Most of the major powers with a possible stake in future resource disputes, including China, Russia, India, Pakistan, and the United States, are armed with nuclear weapons, and all of them are modernizing and expanding their nuclear arsenals. Given all this, the potential for war in the Arctic and other potential climate-affected great-power battle zones requires close attention.
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“A WHOLE NEW OCEAN”
Of all the impacts of global warming, none is as conspicuous—or, some argue, as significant—as the melting of the Arctic ice cap. Temperatures are rising faster in the Arctic region than anywhere else on the planet—Anchorage, Alaska, for example, posted a statewide record high of 90° Fahrenheit in July 2019—and the ice cap is shrinking at a corresponding rate. The extent of winter sea ice floating on the Arctic Ocean was an astonishing 43 percent less in 2017 than it was in 1979, and its summer reach had shrunk by an equivalent amount; the ice cap is expected to shrink even more in the future, and could disappear entirely in summers soon to come.9 As a consequence, oil and gas drilling operations can be undertaken for longer periods of time each year and can extend farther poleward. The melting ice cap also allows increased commercial transit through the Arctic—and, more worrisome from a strategic perspective, increased operations by naval vessels. “Think about the Arctic,” former deputy undersecretary of defense Sherri Goodman told me in a May 2017 interview. “It’s changing more rapidly than the rest of the planet, and recognizing that, we have to now be able to operate in the Arctic because we have a whole new ocean.”10
The notion of the Arctic as a “whole new ocean” has been on the minds of U.S. military officials ever since they began to consider the issue of climate change and national security. “Open seas at the Arctic means you have another side of this continent exposed,” observed Admiral Donald Pilling, former vice chief of naval operations, in a commentary attached to the landmark 2007 CNA study, National Security and the Threat of Climate Change.11 As the military service most likely to be charged with protecting American interests in the Arctic, the Navy has often joined with the Coast Guard in calling attention to warming’s impacts on the region. To provide the necessary analysis for these efforts, in 2009 Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Gary Roughead established Task Force Climate Change, charging it with producing a series of “road maps” for the Navy’s adaptation to a changing Arctic.12
Up until this point, the armed forces had very little strategic guidance to rely on when developing plans for Arctic operations. The only formal statement on the issue, a National Security Presidential Directive released in January 2009 by the outgoing George W. Bush administration, spoke in vague terms about security issues in the Arctic. It indicated that the United States “is an Arctic nation, with varied and compelling interests in that region,” of which resource extraction was identified as the most important. Given Bush’s background in the oil industry, it is hardly surprising that he chose to emphasize expanded oil and natural gas drilling as the nation’s principal Arctic objective. But the directive also acknowledged that any increase in economic activity in the Arctic could generate new security concerns, and so called for increased military attention to the region.13
The Navy’s first Arctic road map took Bush’s directive as its starting point. Even more than in the White House document, however, it stressed the impact of climate change on the Arctic’s emerging geopolitical importance. “The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe,” it noted. “While significant uncertainty exists in projections for Arctic ice extent, the current scientific consensus indicates the Arctic may experience nearly ice-free summers sometime in the 2030s.” The retreating ice cap, it continued, would spur new economic and military activities in the region, including resource extraction, tourism, and intercontinental trade. “These developments offer opportunities for growth,” the road map said, “but also are potential sources of competition and conflict for access and natural resources.” Acknowledging that the Navy was unprepared, at that time, to deal with all such contingencies, it outlined a range of actions it needed to take to be better prepared for future Arctic operations, such as an increased tempo of training exercises and the installation of advanced surveillance and communications gear.14
In addition to undertaking a variety of steps to enhance its own capacity for operating in the region, the Navy has also sought to persuade leaders of the other armed services and the military establishment at large to focus greater attention on the challenges of a warming Arctic. These endeavors achieved their first significant success with Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, who took a personal interest in the topic. “Climate change is shifting the landscape in the Arctic more rapidly than anywhere else in the world,” he declared in a November 2013 address at the NATO-sponsored Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia. “As the Arctic changes, it creates new opportunities—and new challenges.”15
Hagel used the occasion of his appearance at the Halifax Forum to release the DoD’s Arctic Strategy, a Pentagon-wide policy brief modeled on the Navy’s Arctic road map. “The Arctic is at a strategic inflection point,” the DoD’s brief proclaimed, a consequence of diminished sea ice and a resulting increase in energy extraction and other commercial activities. Inevitably, these changes would result in new and expanded responsibilities for the U.S. military, whether in responding to environmental disasters, ensuring the safe passage of American ships and aircraft, or protecting the homeland from attack. While expressing optimism that any future disputes arising in the Arctic would be resolved by peaceful means, the Pentagon brief enjoined the armed services to “prepare for a wide range of challenges and contingencies,” including the use of force “to maintain stability in the region.”16
In a more recent statement on Arctic policy, the 2016 Report to Congress on Strategy to Protect United States National Security Interests in the Arctic Region, the DoD again emphasized the growing geopolitical importance of the region and the need for increased American military involvement there. Two tasks in particular were identified as top Pentagon priorities. The first involved defending the nation’s northern borders against attacks originating in the Arctic, an undertaking that was said to entail upgrading the detection and combat capabilities of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the joint U.S.-Canadian organization responsible for aerospace and maritime warning for North America. The second focused on enhancing U.S. and allied capabilities to overcome hostile forces in the Arctic itself, which translated into forging closer ties with America’s Arctic-oriented allies and an expanded program of joint military maneuvers along the lines of Exercise Cold Response.17
The authors of the 2016 DoD Arctic strategy were clear that the most acute future threat to U.S. security in the Arctic is likely to come from Russia, which is both the most ardent pursuer of economic activities in the region and also the country with the greatest concentration of military capabilities there. “Recent Russian strategy documents emphasize the importance of the Arctic region to Russia and its national economy,” the Pentagon analysts indicated. Driving this outlook, in their view, is Moscow’s intention “to use Russia’s Arctic region as a national strategic resource base to support the country’s socio-economic development.”18
This perception of the Arctic as a major site of geopolitical contestation has grown even more entrenched under the Trump administration. “America’s got to up its game in the Arctic,” then secretary of defense Jim Mattis declared during a visit to Alaska in 2018. Not only was Russia projecting more power into the region, he said, but international energy firms were looking for further drilling opportunities there. “The reality is that we’re going to have to deal with the developing Arctic,” he noted.19 With this in mind, the DoD has increased its operations in the Arctic, conducting periodic exercises like Cold Response 2016 and deploying additional U.S. troops in the region. In 2016, for example, the Marine Corps announced that it would station 330 soldiers near those caves in the Trondheim area of Norway—the first foreign troops to be based in Norway since World War II.20
Although Russia remains the preeminent concern of American strategists when addressing the Arctic, the DoD and the White House are also paying closer attention to China’s emerging interest in the region. In January 2018, the Chinese government released its first Arctic Policy, stating that China was a “near-Arctic state” and that it intended to establish a “Polar Silk Road” for transportation and commerce across the region.21 China’s state-owned oil firms have established ties with key Arctic players, including Norway and Greenland, and announced plans to begin drilling in Arctic waters.22 All this has alarmed American officials, who worry about growing Chinese involvement. “The U.S. is far from alone in seeing the region’s value,” observed Air Force secretary Heather Wilson and chief of staff General David Goldfein in a 2019 opinion piece. “China considers the Arctic as part of its Belt and Road Initiative and is establishing a presence through economic leverage with other Arctic nations.”23
Concern over the growing presence of both Russia and China in the Arctic was a major theme of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s May 2019 address to a meeting of the Arctic Council, an association of regional governments, in Rovaniemi, Finland. The Arctic “has become an arena for power and competition,” he stated, “complete with new threats to … all of our interests in that region.” Russia, he claimed, was militarizing the Arctic and impeding international commerce along the Northern Sea Route, which connects the North Pacific to the Barents Sea; China, for its part, was using economic investment in the region “to establish a permanent security presence.” In response, the Trump administration was “fortifying America’s security and diplomatic presence in the area”—which meant, among other things, “hosting military exercises, strengthening our force presence, [and] rebuilding our icebreaker fleet.”24
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RESOURCE WARS AND OTHER ARCTIC CONTINGENCIES
By and large, the literature on Arctic geopolitics emphasizes the stated desire of the region’s major powers to settle any disagreements that might arise among them in a peaceful manner. “Present geopolitical trends in the Arctic region lead intelligence assessments to predict it is unlikely the region will be the site of state-on-state armed conflict” anytime soon, the U.S. Navy suggested in its second Arctic Roadmap, released in 2014. Looking farther into the future, however, the Navy’s strategists saw more reason to worry. As the ice cap melts and relations among the Arctic powers deteriorate, they said, “tensions could increase due to misperceptions and [inflammatory] rhetoric, as well as the unforeseen dynamics of economic interests in the region.” Disagreements over contested resource zones might further exacerbate tensions, increasing the risk of armed conflict and creating new challenges for the Navy.25
What might cause the relative calm now prevailing in the Arctic to give way to armed conflict? Official U.S. sources are noticeably reluctant to detail such scenarios in unclassified public documents, but a persistent theme emerges in many of them: if conflict occurs, it will most likely arise out of disputes over the ownership of offshore resource zones or the flow of maritime traffic entering and exiting the Arctic Ocean. “Excessive extended continental shelf claims made by Arctic nations … may cause tension and create political uncertainty,” the 2014 road map warned. “Given the resource wealth that could be at stake, a resulting standoff could indeed lead to disputes and military posturing by rival nations.”26
When discussing the “resource wealth that could be at stake” in the Arctic, most analysts begin with its hydrocarbon deposits, believed to be among the world’s largest remaining undeveloped reserves. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the area north of the Arctic Circle possesses approximately 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil resources along with 30 percent of its remaining natural gas.27 Many of these reserves are located in areas under the undisputed control of one or another of the Arctic powers, but others are located in contested areas or in the polar region itself, whose jurisdiction has yet to be determined.28 The region is also thought to harbor vast deposits of vital minerals, including iron, copper, uranium, and rare earths; Greenland is believed to contain especially significant deposits of such minerals, and prominent foreign mining firms—including some from China—have begun operations there.29 Many valuable fish species reside in or migrate through the region, representing an increasingly valuable source of animal protein. As the ice cap shrivels, moreover, the Arctic could provide a cost-effective shortcut for maritime trade between the Atlantic and Pacific.
As these interests proliferate, American strategists believe, the risk of competition and conflict over the Arctic’s resource wealth is bound to grow. “Relatively low economic stakes in the past and fairly well established [offshore development] zones among the Arctic states have facilitated cooperation in pursuit of shared interests in the region, even as polar ice has receded,” Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats testified in May 2017. “However, as the Arctic becomes more open to shipping and commercial exploitation, we assess that risk of competition over access to sea routes and resources, including fish, will include countries traditionally active in the Arctic as well as other countries that do not border on the region [read: China] but increasingly look to advance their economic interests there.”30
The risk of increased competition and conflict over valuable resources and trade routes was also highlighted by Secretary Pompeo in his May 2019 address to the Arctic Council. “Far from the barren backcountry that many thought it to be [in past decades],” he noted, “the Arctic is at the forefront of opportunity and abundance. It houses 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil, 30 percent of its undiscovered gas, and an abundance of uranium, rare earth minerals, gold, diamonds, and millions of square miles of untapped resources.” At the same time, “steady reductions in sea ice”—this said without identifying global warming as the cause—“are opening new passageways and new opportunities for trade.” These developments, Pompeo added, have made the Arctic “the subject of renewed competition,” which could get ugly if other actors, notably China and Russia, fail to play by accepted rules of international commerce.31
Russian officials also suggest that resource competition is likely to be the catalyst for future conflict in the Arctic.32 “By 2050 about 30 percent of all hydrocarbons will be produced in the Arctic area,” Vladimir Putin declared in 2017. “From an economic point of view, this is critically important.” As global warming proceeds, moreover, “the navigation period in the Arctic zone will get longer,” enhancing the value of Russia’s Northern Sea Route, which traverses Russia’s Arctic waters from one end of the country to the other. Given these high stakes, “we need to ensure the use of these routes, develop our economic activity in these areas, and ensure our sovereignty over these territories.” Putin, like many of his top advisers, believes that this will inevitably lead to clashes with other major powers, who may seek to challenge Russia’s claims to vital Arctic resources and trade routes. “Let us not forget about the purely military aspect of the matter,” Putin avowed. “This is an extremely important region from the point of view of ensuring our country’s defense capability.”33
In accordance with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), Russia has claimed an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) stretching 200 nautical miles out from its extended Arctic coastline, allowing it the undisputed right to exploit marine and mineral resources there. But for Russian authorities, as for those of neighboring countries, a major source of concern is control over development rights to waters of the Arctic extending beyond each country’s EEZ. Under Article 76 of the Law of the Sea, coastal states can claim the exclusive development rights to their extended continental shelf up to 350 nautical miles offshore if they can convince the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, a UN-affiliated body, that their continental margin stretches that far out. Such claims to extended undersea rights can be highly contentious. Canada, Denmark (acting for Greenland), Norway, and Russia have all submitted or are in the process of submitting claims encompassing large swaths of the Arctic, presumably ones rich in oil and gas reserves; the United States, although not yet a signatory to UNCLOS, is collecting the data required to do so.34 As these claims have yet to be thoroughly documented and submitted to the commission, it is not known whether any of them officially overlap. However, senior officials of Canada, Denmark, and Russia have all said that the Lomonosov Ridge—an underwater feature that straddles the North Pole, from Canada and Greenland on one side to northeastern Siberia on the other—constitutes a natural extension of their own nation’s continental shelf, and so is theirs alone to develop. The danger, then, is that these countries will assert claims to the same stretches of undersea territory, conceivably triggering a future clash over valuable hydrocarbon assets.35
Such a confrontation may appear unlikely at this point in time, given the present difficulty of operating in the Arctic and the relative adequacy of resource reservoirs located below the Arctic Circle. As time goes on, however, the Arctic will become increasingly accessible due to climate change while energy supplies elsewhere may dwindle, altering the perceived geoeconomic equation. Under these circumstances, the various claimants to offshore Arctic territories could prove more unyielding in their assertions of sovereignty. “The Arctic is ours, and we should demonstrate our presence,” said Artur Chilingarov, deputy chairman of the Russian Duma and a prominent spokesperson on Russian Arctic policy.36 (Chilingarov is most famous for piloting the submersible vehicle that planted a Russian flag made of titanium on the North Pole seabed in 2007.37) But American, Canadian, Danish, and Norwegian officials would also all say that large parts of the Arctic are “theirs.” Given that all of the Arctic states view their offshore territories in this fashion, the potential for friction and conflict over disputed resources is significant.
The protection of resource assets is, in fact, one of the major tasks assigned to all of the additional military forces being deployed in the Russian Arctic at Putin’s behest. Aside from its traditional task of constituting a credible nuclear deterrent, the Northern Fleet is now responsible for defending Russian drilling rigs in the region and the facilities that support them. Protection of these assets is also an important mission of the Federal Security Service (FSB) border guards in the region; to better perform this role, FSB troop strength has been increased by 30 percent and Arctic bases have been newly built or rehabilitated to house them.38
These developments notwithstanding, it may be difficult to imagine a conflict erupting in the open waters of the Arctic Ocean itself. Unless accompanied by icebreakers, surface warships will find it extremely difficult to reach those waters, let alone engage in traditional combat maneuvers.39 However, long before the ice cap melts entirely, fighting could erupt in and around the Arctic’s main points of entry and exit: the Bering Strait, connecting it to the North Pacific, and the Barents Sea, connecting it to the North Atlantic. Without unimpeded access to those passageways, no country can gain access to the Arctic’s resources or export them to markets elsewhere in the world. Hence, if a war were to break out over control of Arctic resource zones, it could well be fought in or near those nautical bottlenecks.
American strategists see the Bering Strait as a particularly likely site for such an engagement. This narrow strip of water—fifty-one miles across at its narrowest point—connects the North Pacific with the Chukchi Sea (an offshoot of the Arctic) while separating easternmost Siberia from Alaska. Shipping through the Bering Strait, both military and commercial, is bound to grow as the ice cap melts, increasing the strait’s strategic significance. This is true both for the United States, which hopes to see an increase in energy extraction in Alaska’s offshore waters, and for Russia, which seeks increased traffic through the Northern Sea Route.40 In recognition of the strait’s strategic significance, both countries have been strengthening their military capabilities in the immediate area. Russia has reinforced its Cape Schmidt and Wrangel Island bases in Chukotka, in far eastern Siberia; the United States is beefing up its forces at Eielson and Elmendorf air bases, located near Fairbanks and Anchorage, respectively.41 In 2017, for example, the Air Force announced that it would deploy fifty-four advanced F-35 stealth fighters at Eielson, representing a significant increase in U.S. combat power.42
The Bering Strait area has also been the site of stepped-up training exercises and other demonstrations of military muscle. The Russians conducted a series of amphibious landings on Cape Vankarem, in the Chukchi Sea, as part of its massive “Vostok 2018” exercise involving some three hundred thousand troops.43 On the Alaska side of the Chukchi Sea, the Department of Defense has been conducting a major combat exercise, called Northern Edge, every other year.44 More worryingly, both sides routinely conduct air patrols over these waters to identify adversary capabilities and test defensive responses; on some occasions, these can lead to risky military encounters, as when the aircraft of one side approaches too close to the airspace of another. In May 2018, for example, two Russian Tu-95 “Bear” nuclear-capable bombers entered American airspace off Alaska’s west coast and were turned away by two F-22 fighters from Elmendorf sent to intercept them.45
Considerable attention has also been paid by the major powers to the other primary access point to the Russian Arctic, the Barents Sea. Connecting the North Atlantic and the Norwegian Sea in the west to the Kara Sea (another Arctic offshoot) in the east, the Barents Sea is an essential lifeline to Russia’s northernmost territories. At present, the West’s primary strategic concern over the Barents Sea is focused on increased Russian submarine activity, as exemplified by a 2016 Pentagon decision to reoccupy the U.S. naval base at Keflavik in Iceland and to deploy P-8 Poseidon antisubmarine warfare patrol planes there.46 In the future, however, these waters (and adjoining land areas) could become the site of a larger geopolitical struggle, as Russia increases its maritime traffic through the Barents Sea and bolsters its military capabilities in adjacent areas—precisely the scenario that underlay Exercise Cold Response 2016.
The strategic importance of the Barents Sea was accorded further emphasis in May 2018, when the Department of Defense reactivated the Navy’s Second Fleet (it had been deactivated in 2011 to save funds) and gave it responsibility for U.S. and allied defense in the North Atlantic. Significantly, Admiral John Richardson, chief of naval operations, indicated that the Second Fleet’s area of operations would extend right up to the entrance to Russia’s naval enclave in the Barents Sea, an obvious threat to Moscow. “Second Fleet will approach the North Atlantic as one continuous operational space and conduct expeditionary fleet operations where and when needed,” Richardson declared.47 It is no wonder, then, that Russia’s Northern Fleet has been stepping up its own combat preparations. In June 2018, it staged a major exercise, involving combat maneuvers in the Baltic Sea by some thirty-six warships—said to be its largest such drill in decades.48
Whatever the immediate cause of a great-power clash in the Barents or Bering Sea, any fighting that erupts there could easily escalate to high-intensity combat—and potentially to nuclear war. This risk is especially present in the areas facing Russia’s naval facilities around Murmansk, the Northern Fleet’s headquarters and home port for its ballistic missile–carrying submarines. Vladimir Putin has explicitly raised the prospect of nuclear escalation arising from future military engagements in this region. “I do not want to stoke any fears here,” he said in a 2017 interview on Russia’s interests in the Arctic, “but experts are aware that U.S. nuclear submarines remain on duty in northern Norway … and we need to have a clear idea of what is happening there. We must protect this shore accordingly, and ensure proper border guarding.”49 Combine this with Admiral Richardson’s pledge to extend the area of operations of the Navy’s Second Fleet right up to Russian territory in the Barents Sea, and it is not hard to conceive of a scenario in which a clash there initiates a catastrophic escalatory spiral.
For now, the likelihood of a major-power conflict erupting over the energy and mineral supplies of the Arctic would appear relatively low, given the difficulty of exploiting those resources and the apparent sufficiency of existing stockpiles to meet global needs. It is not impossible, however, to imagine a time in the relatively near future when global warming and widespread state failure have made the extraction of African and Middle Eastern oil and gas reserves nearly impossible, while Arctic reservoirs have become far more accessible. Climate scientists now believe that summer temperatures in large parts of the Middle East will average 110 to 120 degrees Fahrenheit for long stretches of time, making outdoor labor there nearly impossible.50 At that point, the major industrial powers may be forced to abandon their reliance on African and Middle Eastern resources and turn to alternative sources. Under those circumstances, war in the Arctic over vital resource supplies becomes far more plausible.
Adding to this danger is the growing perception of the Arctic as a major arena for great-power competition. In the words of Secretary Pompeo, “We’re entering a new age of strategic engagement in the Arctic, complete with new threats to the Arctic and its real estate.”51 As an expression of growing U.S. determination to counter its rivals in the area, the Navy announced in early 2019 that it would begin conducting “freedom of navigation operations” in Arctic waters, possibly by sending warships along the Northern Sea Route. This, in turn, has incensed Russian leaders, who perceive such operations as a potential threat to Russian sovereignty.52 How all this will play out in the years ahead cannot be foreseen, but the disappearance of the ice cap may eliminate the region’s historic immunity to friction and conflict. Hubbert has issued a correction as of 22:37 on Mar 2, 2024
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Mar 1, 2024 21:42
