Navy Times By: David Larter, Defense News and Geoff Ziezulewicz 7/23/2019
If you think your ship has everything it needs to operate anywhere in the world, you might consider stocking up on baseball bats, silicone heating pads, mukluks and working uniforms with seven layers of insulation.
That’s because if lawmakers here have their way, the Navy might cut you orders to what they’re calling “Strategic Arctic Ports†— anchorages near increasingly thawing waterways in a northern region that’s becoming an “emerging strategic choke point of future great power competition.â€
All of that’s tucked into Section 1041 of the new 988-page defense spending bill. It orders the Pentagon to begin coordinating with the U.S. Coast Guard and Maritime Administration to find “potential sites for one of more strategic ports in the Arctic,†a place Navy surface warships and aircraft carriers have rarely ventured over the past three decades.
Once standard issue for warships nosing north of the Arctic Circle, the bats will shatter ice-encased decks while the pads stop oil and transmission fluid from freezing to their pans.
And you might need the soft mukluk boots worn by indigenous Arctic people and soldiers at the Army’s Northern Warfare Training Center in Alaska just to avoid freezing to death in the dark winter.
“The environment requires a degree of preparedness, not just for the execution of military operations but even just to have families live in that environment,†said Maj. Chad Peltier, the commandant of the Center at Fort Wainwright, near Fairbanks.
The legislation mandates that the northern ports will host “at least one of each type of Navy or Coast Guard vessel,†including a guided-missile destroyer and a Legend-class National Security Cutter, along with a heavy polar ice breaker.
The sites will have the capacity for equipment, fuel storage and defense systems and be linked by roads to airports that can support military aircraft.
That should satisfy lawmakers who fret about Russia’s strategic Arctic goals and burgeoning interest in Beijing for patrolling waterways increasingly devoid of ice in the warmer months, potentially creating faster trade — or invasion — routes.
Moscow considers its roughly 7,000 miles of Arctic shoreline as both a strategic liability that’s being beefed up with military might and the key to its economic future. Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2017 pegged the potential mineral wealth in the region at $30 trillion.
To Daniel Goure, a former defense official in George W. Bush’s administration and now the senior vice president of the nonprofit Lexington Institute, Moscow sees the Arctic as a “vulnerable long flank,†especially for incoming aircraft and missiles.
That’s why spending a few dollars up north could force the Russians to invest heavily to counter comparatively meager American investment.
“The cost of maintaining, say, an airbase in the Arctic is enormous. And those are resources that could be used otherwise to threaten, for example, countries in Europe,†he said.
More:
https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2019/07/23/the-worst-orders-youll-ever-get/
