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At –40°F, cold is not a condition simply to be managed. It is a constraint that governs everything. Equipment fails, humans slow, and mistakes compound. Any serious discussion of Arctic military strategy and operations needs to begin with and remain grounded in reality.

Unfortunately, there is an ever-expanding discourse around Arctic security that does not do this. Spend enough time in the Arctic, in winter, in darkness, in sustained extreme cold — and the reality check arrives quickly. Concepts that seem logical in a briefing room dissolve once eyelashes freeze shut, fingers lose dexterity, and the simple act of tying boot laces becomes a test of mental and physical endurance. 

The Arctic security community includes many thoughtful scholars, analysts, and practitioners doing serious work. The literature created by this community has expanded rapidly in recent years, reflecting the Arctic’s growing prominence in discussions of great-power competition, force posture, and deterrence. What was once a niche area of study is now firmly embedded in mainstream strategic discourse. Now we can read many strong views about what the military should do in the Arctic: where forces should be based, how they should operate, and whether persistent, year-round presence is both necessary and achievable. 

That attention is understandable and, in many respects, welcome. But that attention sometimes leads to hyperbolic analysis and grand prescriptions overlooking the Arctic’s harsh reality. The intent here is not to indict members of this community. Nor is it an argument that only those with deep Arctic experience are qualified to think seriously about Arctic strategy. Rather, the intent is to highlight a recurring gap in the broader Arctic security discourse: a tendency to advance ambitious military prescriptions seemingly without sufficient appreciation for what the Arctic actually demands of the people, equipment, and organizations operating within it.

The Arctic is an extreme place where the environment is the first enemy, and everything else is secondary. It may be impossible to grasp the intensity of the Arctic and the constraints it imposes without having spent extended time there in winter and outside. Cold degrades equipment. Darkness affects cognition. Distance complicates logistics. Human bodies, even well-trained ones, have limits. Exposed skin freezes quickly. Metal drains heat instantly. Batteries fail. Lubricants thicken or seize. Plastics crack. Tasks that take minutes elsewhere take hours. Even a light wind at –40°F can turn manageable exposure into something life-threatening in mere minutes. Experiential knowledge does not replace thoughtful analysis, but it ought to fundamentally shape it.

Yet much of the Arctic security literature implicitly treats people as interchangeable components in a system, assuming that training and doctrine can compensate for environmental stress indefinitely. Presence is discussed as if it were an on-off switch rather than a costly, fragile condition that must be achieved and continually sustained. Logistics appear in the discourse as assumed rather than a central determinant of what is possible. The scholarly commentary, in many ways, reflects the content of the official Arctic strategies from the Defense Department and the armed forces. When these documents underweight the significance of the environmental challenges, so too will the ensuing scholarly commentary. Better Arctic analysis starts with better Arctic strategy. 

The Defense Department’s 2024 Arctic Strategy describes the region as harsh and austere. The Army’s new Arctic doctrine offers rudimentary cold mitigation techniques (e.g., wear more warming layers) for ground troops. But acknowledgement and mitigation are not integration. Strategy emphasizes enhanced presence and sustained operations — doctrine explains how to stay warm. Neither fully integrates the predictable and cumulative effects of human performance and equipment degradation in extreme cold. This should be a shaping constraint for strategic ambition. Still, we read prescriptions for Arctic military strategy and operations — in some cases from the U.S. military services themselves — that are delivered with breezy confidence but sometimes fail to consider the tactical and operational requirements of executing the missions they prescribe in one of the harshest environments imaginable. 

Service strategies are not tactical manuals. They prescribe the means and ways of achieving broad ends. But when strategy charges ambitious goals — persistent presence, sustained deterrence — without direction to integrate physiological and psychological limits into force design and execution, it results in conceptually ambitious and operationally detached substance. The Army’s 2021 Arctic Strategy, for example, charges the Army with “Regaining Arctic Dominance,” implying both prior dominance — which it arguably never enjoyed — and the feasibility of restoring it. Never mind the fact that the Arctic is predominantly a maritime domain, and more than half of the Arctic landmass lies within Russian territory. Even with its emphasis on Arctic-capable forces and multi-domain operations, the strategy fails to discuss human performance as a root enabler, or limiting factor, of achieving its ambitious goals. 

The Navy’s Arctic Strategy is similarly mis-calibrated, calling for enhanced and persistent maritime presence. Sustained surface presence in the Arctic is an episodic event at best for the Navy. Ice-breaking constraints, seasonal accessibility, and variable sea conditions complicate the ability to maintain enhanced surface presence. And this says nothing of the men and women aboard the ships charged with executing the mission. 

The Air Force’s Arctic Strategy seems more grounded in the service’s current capabilities. While human performance may be less of a constraint for sustained air operations, the Air Force strategy assumes human endurance at high-latitude bases constantly battling extreme cold and sometimes darkness. The human cost to the mission is not treated as a structural variable affecting readiness. 

The collective strategies and doctrinal guidance broadly acknowledge Arctic conditions. They emphasize training, infrastructure, capabilities, presence. They rarely specify the human element central to execution and feasibility. Elevated confidence follows in the scholarly debates that — at times and reflective of strategic guidance — equally undervalue the human toll.  

Scholars, analysts, and policymakers all have essential roles to play in the Arctic security discourse. But those roles are strengthened — not weakened — when analytical confidence is grounded in and tempered by environmental understanding, and when prescriptions are framed with appropriate caution about what is and is not realistic. Recommendations for more permanent bases and continuous operational presence lose credibility when they are advanced without serious discussion of how cold, darkness, distance, and human limits interact.

What does a responsible, reasonable, and feasible Arctic strategy look like once environmental and human constraints are considered as primary variables rather than footnotes? The strategic ends are for the Defense Department to determine, but the ways and means to accomplish these ends should take certain factors into consideration. 

First, the Defense Department should abandon the assumption that persistence equals seriousness. In the Arctic, persistent presence is not a performative baseline measure. Persistent presence is a prohibitive condition — given current capabilities — that imposes costs on people and equipment. Pituffik Space Base (formerly Thule Air Force Space) in northwest Greenland is currently the U.S. military’s only permanent base north of the Arctic Circle (66°33’N). Other bases in Alaska south of the Arctic Circle are within the Arctic climatic region as defined in the United States. But because of their proximity to metropolitan areas and infrastructure, these bases do not replicate the extreme limitations of permanent existence and isolation north of the Arctic Circle. Even Eielson Air Force Base and Fort Wainwright — both in the vicinity of Fairbanks, Alaska, just south of 65°N — are well-connected and sustained. Pituffik is both costly and logistically difficult to maintain. While Pituffik demonstrates permanent Arctic presence is sustainable, the cost of doing so is comparably prohibitive. 

A more realistic approach favors rotational presence over persistent presence — short, deliberate, recurring Arctic deployments, like those the U.S. Marine Corps execute in Norway and U.S. Special Forces conduct in Sweden. These are designed to build familiarity, normalize exposure, test systems and equipment and human psyches, and demonstrate accessibility without degrading force posture beyond the limits of effectiveness. Expanding a regionally aligned force model for the Arctic – like the Army’s 11th Airborne Division – also warrants greater consideration as a strategic baseline. Arctic military capabilities should not be measured in permanence, but rather in how reliably a unit can arrive, operate and accomplish its mission, and egress with intact force posture.

Existing readiness frameworks emphasize force availability and time on station. Doctrine emphasizes cold acclimatization and injury mitigation. A readiness construct integrating physiological and psychological decline in extreme cold is underdeveloped, however. Prolonged exposure at or beyond defined tolerance thresholds will affect human performance and mission completion. Pre- and post-exposure conditions matter. 

For example, a small unit that conducts repeated dismounted operations in sustained sub-zero temperatures will experience degradation in their equipment and physiology over time. Tasks will progressively take longer. Errors will increase. Day by day, these factors will add to the layers of operational difficulty. As time progresses, the enemy situation soon becomes secondary to human endurance and equipment function. Thus there is a correlation between exposure and conditional decline that should be a guiding factor in planning the means and ways of future operations to achieve operational and strategic ends. 

A unit that retrogrades after five days of exposure with limited impact to personnel and equipment sustains a higher readiness rating for recurring operations than a unit returning from 10 days of exposure and corresponding conditional decline to its personnel and equipment, thus requiring extended reconstitution and recovery time, and a lower readiness rating. The specific readiness and condition metrics for equipment and personnel are better left to the engineers and physiologists to determine. Heuristics assessing human and equipment conditions before and after cold weather operations would be a valued informative basis for determining operational and tactical feasibility of strategic prescriptions. Suffice to say, however, that current strategic outlines for Arctic operations come up short in this regard, leaving much to be assumed rather than thoughtfully considered and deliberately assessed. We can do better. 

The lesson is not that Arctic operations are impossible, but that duration and exposure time are the primary strategic variables affecting personnel and equipment in the Arctic. Current official strategies and doctrine insufficiently capture the human element. Prescriptions absent such analysis are assumptions. In the Arctic, nothing can be assumed. Responsible Arctic strategies and operational planning, therefore, should consider human limits, explicitly anchored to psychological and physiological metrics rather than mission ambition alone. In the Arctic, withdrawing and reconstituting is not a failure of will — it is often an expression of necessity and discipline.

Whether debating deterrence in the Arctic or monitoring or power projection, none of these require constant ground presence. Sustained air operations are realistic, but continuous Arctic land and maritime operations are neither necessary nor feasible. The U.S. armed forces should continue engaging in punctuated exercises in the Arctic and ongoing visible demonstrations of military reach via rotational force deployments and training.Permanent basing undoubtedly relieves some of the logistical burdens of projecting power via rotational force deployments, acting as a critical infrastructure node to sustain forward forces. However, unless or until there is a significant change in Arctic force posture and planning via budgetary commitments for future Arctic basing, arguments for persistent presence are not feasible, no matter how nicely they read on paper. 

The Arctic does not need fewer ideas. It needs better-grounded ones rooted in the realities of the human condition. The Arctic security discourse benefits from voices that combine analytical skill with lived appreciation for environmental constraints, and from writers willing to say not just what could be done, but what might realistically be sustained — and at what cost.

For those seeking to contribute meaningfully to the Arctic debate, there is a simple suggestion, if you have the means and ability to do so: go north. Not briefly. Not in summer. Not shielded by heated tents and short visits just to say you’ve been there. Go to the Arctic in winter. In darkness. Be outside. Stay long enough for the environment to impress its lessons. Then return to the page with those lessons in mind.

And for editors who shape the boundaries of this discourse, perhaps a modest proposal: When publishing arguments that advocate expanded Arctic military presence or persistent operations, consider encouraging transparency about an author’s firsthand experience in the region. Not as a gatekeeping mechanism, but as context. Readers deserve to know the perspective from which claims are made, just as they do in other domains of expertise.

In the end, the Arctic is indifferent, unforgiving, and honest. It rewards preparation and punishes assumption. Strategies and recommendations that aspire to be credible should begin with respect for that reality. Experience does not guarantee correctness — but in the Arctic, where everything is trying to kill you, experience is often the difference between confidence and understanding.

Ryan Burke, Ph.D, is a professor of military and strategic studies at the U.S. Air Force Academy, an affiliate professor at the University of Alaska–Fairbanks Center for Arctic Security and Resilience, and co-director of the Modern War Institute’s Project 6633. He is a veteran U.S. Marine Corps officer who has written widely on polar warfare and has extensive experience on the ground in conflict zones in the Middle East, Sahel, and Eastern Europe. He has also operated in extreme isolation in both polar regions during embedded training with conventional and special operations forces in the North American and European Arctics, as well as on a climbing expedition traversing previously unexplored terrain in the Transantarctic Mountains.

The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Department of Defense, Department of the Air Force, or the U.S. Air Force Academy.

** Please note, as a matter of house style, War on the Rocks will not use a different name for the U.S. Department of Defense until and unless the name is changed by statute by the U.S. Congress.

Image: Julie Scott via Wikimedia Commons