Army helicopter crews assigned to fly and operate in arctic conditions will now answer to leadership based with them in Alaska rather than commanders in Hawaii or near Seattle. They’ll now report instead to the newly activated Arctic Aviation Command at Fort Wainwright, just outside of Fairbanks, Alaska.
“You have to be in the Arctic to understand the Arctic,” Col. Russ Vanderlugt, the unit’s new commander, told Task & Purpose.
The new unit officially stood up on Aug. 8 as a local headquarters for two active-duty aviation battalions already in Alaska: 1st Battalion, 52nd Aviation Regiment and 1st Battalion, 25th Aviation Regiment. The units previously answered to headquarters at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington near Seattle and Fort Shafter, Hawaii. Now, both flying units fall under the Alaska-based 11th Airborne Division.
The new structure means that the leaders of the units will be local in Alaska to manage training, mitigate risk and provide a direct line of support through to the division. There are no plans to expand the size or number of aviation units in Alaska.
It also means new equipment and ideas for cold-weather flyers. The Alaska units already have upgraded the heaters inside some helicopters and have installed windscreens for door gunners to avoid the sub-zero windchill.
Previously, major flying decisions for the two Alaska-based battalions had to go through leaders in Washington and Hawaii. Now they can “keep that risk in house,” Vanderlugt said, with missions reviewed and approved by him or other 11th Airborne officials.
The 11th Airborne Division was activated in June 2022 as part of the U.S. Arctic strategy to counter growing regional influences from its adversaries. The latest strategy released in July, calls out growing military cooperation between Russia and China, like combined Naval exercises off the coast of Alaska, as a threat to Arctic stability. The new aviation unit is part of the 11th’s planned role as the Army’s subject matter experts for Arctic combat. Having units in Alaska allows the U.S. military to get anywhere in the Pacific or regions in the high north faster, Vanderlugt said.
“A lot of forces will flow through Alaska. Our alignment here puts the aviation assets in the 11th Airborne really at the tip of the spear to be able to go anywhere quickly,” he said. “It’s strategic. It’s intentional that we’re growing this capability here.”
The division is headquartered at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. As part of the units’ growing knowledge of surviving and training in the Arctic, Vanderlugt said his soldiers will have to improve their proficiency on skis.
“That’s a huge part about Arctic soldiering up here,” he said. “That’s gonna be a big focus for me as a commander because what’s really important is during the Arctic night when the sun doesn’t even rise in many parts of Alaska, you have to get outside. You can’t just go to the weight room or the gym, but you gotta get outside and you gotta do these Arctic activities in the cold and it helps you acclimate to it.”
Flying in the Arctic
Vanderlugt said officials are in the process of refining the service’s Arctic doctrine which will dictate training, equipment and requirements for the Army’s Alaska mission – with the 11th Airborne Division as a “key sounding board for that.”
“In order to help the commander assess tactical risk and save the lives of pilots, I’m looking to maximize survivability wherever possible,” Vanderlugt said. “The operational environment is really harsh on us and survivability extends to all war fighting functions that aviation has to use.”
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For sustainment operations in the Arctic, this means getting food, fuel, ammunition to a forward arming and refueling point or maintaining communications with electronics with batteries that might quickly run dead in the deep cold.
Soldiers also noted the problems with using munitions in extreme cold. On Chinook helicopters, for instance, soldiers are testing a wind deflector for gunners, CW3 Michael Harms, the command’s aviation mission survivability officer said.
“Flying even at zero degrees with the window open, when you’re doing 100 knots, the wind chill is just too much. A window deflector will hopefully help them with being able to open their windows and utilize their weapon systems as well,” Harms said.
There are also a slew of modifications that Alaska units make to their aircrafts in order to fly in the Arctic in both summer and winter.
“Landing in the snow here is quite difficult. It’s different from landing in dust or sand in a desert environment,” said CW4 Vincent Sandoval, the command’s senior aviation maintenance officer. Because of this, all of the Army’s aircraft in Alaska have skis “the size of a barn door” so soldiers can land in the tundra and on the snow.
Arctic angels, Sandoval said, train “as cold as we can get,” but the reality is that training is often halted when temperatures reach around -40 degrees fahrenheit because the fuel freezes. As part of their training, soldiers regularly test new equipment to keep operations going.
“We had to get a heater installed in the new [UH-60] M-model that we got up here. The electric heater that they had, very similar to electric heating you could get in your house, but it could not warm the air quick enough,” Sandoval said, adding that Sikorky developed and soldiers tested the new technology. “Now we have all 15 medevac aircraft outfitted with those new heaters.”
As soldiers continue to sharpen their Arctic expertise ahead of their January rotation at the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center, Vanderlugt said the new command change also means that all of his soldiers will now wear the distinctive ‘Arctic Angels’ blue patch with a red and white emblem with angel wings.
“When you take two separate organizations that are reporting to Hawaii and Washington, they’re wearing the patches of those organizations and their identity and their purpose and their mission is aligned to those organizations,” Vanderlugt said. “Now, we’re bringing it all under one organization, the Arctic Aviation Command. We wear one patch.”