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Executive Summary
Despite the war in Ukraine, Russia has not scaled down its commitment to develop its Arctic region from the Barents Sea to the Bering Strait. As analyzed in earlier publications, the Northern Sea Route connects Russia to China, encouraging the two countries to cooperate on developing the energy and shipping potential of Russia’s Arctic coastline. The route also allows them to expand military-strategic collaboration to benefit their economies while posing a hard power threat to the United States and its allies.1
In the Barents Sea near the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) area of operation, China plays a dual-use role in facilitating Russia’s ability to pose a hard-power threat to the US and its allies in northern Europe. Beijing has avoided opening another flank toward the US alliance system in a region China does not prioritize, but Moscow has designed its force posture to protect its nuclear threat against the US and its regional allies. This priority includes coordinating naval operations in the Barents and Norwegian Seas and the Greenland–Iceland–United Kingdom (GIUK) Gap with its Baltic Sea operations, resulting in the strategic merging of the Arctic and Baltic Sea regions. Russia and China are strengthening their military cooperation across the Bering Sea region and the North Pacific, which merges the two regions strategically. As a result, Japan and South Korea have greater interests in the Arctic.
This report argues that Russia’s China-enabled threat presents a homeland security concern to all of the US’s NATO allies in the Arctic and to its Japanese and South Korean allies in the North Pacific. However, the United States is the only Arctic nation whose interests span the entire Arctic region. This vast, sparsely populated area features extreme weather conditions. The US and its allies have few polar-capable capabilities and need to develop them as military-strategic threats grow in complexity. The US is in a strategic position to coordinate joint operational planning and acquisition plans to ensure that deterrence is effective across the Arctic and that its allies could defend themselves in full-scale warfare.
America’s missile defenses, uncrewed systems, and submarine forces are central to deterring aggression in the Arctic and defending it if deterrence fails. However, the US military faces numerous demands across the world, so it will have to operate in conjunction with allies during all phases of Arctic warfare and in multiple theaters. In particular, US submarine forces will be in high demand, so allies will need to contribute similar capacities in the Arctic rather than rely on the United States.
Meanwhile, Russia poses the following threats in the Arctic:
- A credible nuclear threat against the US homeland and allies, taking advantage of low visibility and insufficient surveillance of Arctic airspace and waters
- Expansion of successful submarine operation areas in the Barents and Norwegian Seas and the GIUK Gap
- Stronger patrolling and defense of areas with contested claims in the Arctic Ocean
- Coordinated naval operations for the Arctic and Baltic Sea regions
- Development of joint hybrid and military operational concepts with China for the Arctic and the North Pacific regions
Therefore, a concept of operations needs to accomplish several tasks:
- Deter Russia and China’s gradual expansion of their military-strategic operations
- Provide domain awareness across the Arctic region
- Increase the resilience of critical allied civilian and military infrastructure and capabilities
- Create an interoperability across northern Europe and the North Pacific that integrates the Baltic and Barents Sea regions and the North Pacific and Bering Sea regions
- Maintain freedom of navigation through commercial and coast guard operations where this principle is challenged
The report concludes with these recommendations:
- The allies need to mitigate the nuclear threat with additional early warning, tracking, and interception capabilities in eastern Greenland; a more robust satellite intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and targeting infrastructure; and more redundancy in allied space capabilities across the North Atlantic. Such efforts would strengthen multi-domain awareness and increase infrastructure resilience, and Denmark, Norway, Japan, and South Korea would be useful partners for these programs.
- Allied forces should develop uncrewed systems to penetrate Russia’s bastion defenses and prevent its submarines from exiting. These systems should be stationed close to the Barents Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk to raise Moscow’s cost of trying to expand its submarines’ area of operation. In the short term, exercises near Russian submarine bases and in its exclusive economic zone would deter Russia and put it on the defensive. Norway, the UK, and Japan can build these antisubmarine forces.
- The allies should field a denser and more reliable network of monitoring capabilities—such as ice-hardened patrol and antisubmarine vessels, underwater sensor networks, and uncrewed underwater vehicles—to close ISR gaps across the Arctic and adjacent regions and to strengthen maritime domain awareness and infrastructure resilience. Canada, Denmark, Japan, and South Korea would be key in this effort.
- The US, Canada, and Denmark should use commercial and military assets to conduct icebreaker patrols in the Arctic Ocean and along Canada’s Northwest Passage. These operations would mitigate Russian patrolling of areas with competing claims, demonstrate the allies’ presence in remote areas, and enhance maritime domain awareness. Patrolling would also defend freedom of navigation rights in disputed waters.
- The US and its allies should integrate Arctic, Baltic, and North Pacific naval warfare operations into two joint coordinated force postures to strengthen interoperability and deterrence. This effort would counter Russian and Russian-Chinese operational plans by coupling the Arctic with the two theaters. Finland, Sweden, and Denmark would be key in the Baltic, and Canada, South Korea, and Japan would help in the North Pacific.
- South Korea’s polar-capable port and shipbuilding infrastructure can establish a dual-use presence from the North Pacific and along the Northern Sea Route. This would improve maritime domain awareness and defend freedom of navigation rights in an area where Russia and China are increasing their hybrid and military activities.
David Byrd, Bryan Clark, Shane Dennin, Zane Rivers, and Timothy A. Walton contributed to this report.