During World War II, the U.S. got a taste of what a war in the Arctic could look like. In the Battle of Attu, the Japanese army took the Aleutian island of Attu in Alaska and the 7th Infantry Division was sent in to retake it.
“There were more cold weather casualties in that battle than battle injuries. If you combine the deaths and battle injuries together, they’re almost equivalent to the cold weather casualties,” said Army Capt. Ed Garibay. “When you think about that in terms of operational readiness, even a 10% loss in personnel would be a significant amount.”
The Attu battle is one of dozens of lessons and hard-earned skills incorporated into a new technical manual released in February meant to be the guidebook and blueprint for Army soldiers and Marines operating in Arctic and extreme cold weather.
As with other Army publications, the 267-page manual covers the nitty gritty details of combat like ambushes and evacuations, but also off-beat issues that soldiers might never consider until the moment they need it. There’s advice to chaplains on how to keep their wine warm for religious ceremonies, and clear direction that Army bands should not perform outside in arctic climates to avoid likely “injuries” when bare skin and lips meet metal instruments.
But the bulk of the manual is about combat in the world’s coldest conditions, and emphasizes that fighting in the extreme cold is a “perishable skill” that the Army hasn’t prioritized until recently, said Richard Creed, director of the Combined Arms Doctrine Directorate at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
“Almost everything else about your baseline assumptions of how the environment operates changes. The fundamental understanding that the sun will come up tomorrow is not a given fact in the Arctic,” said Garibay, lead author of the manual. “If you’re in the winter time frame, you have periods of 24 hours of darkness or longer.”
The manual is built on the military’s pivot away from the Middle East and towards the Arctic, based on growing concerns over Russian and Chinese economic plans to capitalize as melting icecaps open new shipping lanes. Troops in the future may also be exposed to extreme cold weather environments in the Pacific, an area which one Army general said would require “arctic capable forces.”
“You’ve got the Russians, the Chinese, and other people moving around up there, looking for resources or looking for ways to flow goods and exploit that area economically or so forth,” Creed told Task & Purpose. “All of a sudden now we have to pay attention to it as well because we have interests there.”
The new manual gets into the national defense implications but the larger messages and instructions are centered around the unforgiving nature of Arctic and extreme cold weather climates and what that means for American troops: slower movements, the threat of cold weather injuries, and the morale needed to keep units from “cocooning,” or showing “withdrawn behavior resulting from inexperience to the cold.”
Leaders who are good at thinking fast on their feet based on a full military career in temperate environments could mean “solid decisions in lower latitudes,” Garibay said, but in the Arctic, the fundamental operational principles of survival, gear, and logistics change, so “your now 20-plus years of experience could be taking you down the wrong direction.”
‘Arctic determination’
While the Army had focused on fighting wars in the desert for the last 20 years, the manual emphases intentional training for Arctic conditions to make forces able to withstand the harsh conditions.
The manual implores the idea of “arctic determination,” which Garibay said is derived from the Finnish word “sisu” meaning a type of grit or perseverance and “ability to maintain your composure in very extreme conditions.”
“It’s not a coincidence that the Finns, who live in extreme Arctic conditions, have a word for this,” Garibay said. “It’s not the quintessential cliche of ‘embrace the suck’ type-deal. It’s not blind ambition into unsafe situations. It’s a building of confidence in your ability to overcome the environment so that you can succeed and thrive in this environment.”
The most relatable example, Garibay said, is going outside during the winter and feeling hesitation before “you open the door and go out to your car or when you dip your toe into just slightly cold water and don’t want to jump in.”
To overcome this, the Army has soldiers doing daily physical training outside, even in negative-40 degree Fahrenheit, or immersion-style courses where soldiers are dropped into freezing waters to learn how to survive if they were to fall through ice.
“You have to operate in this environment to understand how to operate in this environment,” said Lt. Col. Kyle Spade, former battalion commander for 11th Airborne Division’s 2nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team.
This extends to training and understanding how to prevent cold weather injuries, an issue that has involved extra research and revisions to broader cold weather references like wind chill standards, which track how fast soldiers can develop frostbite on skin exposed to the wind.
“You sweat, you die,” Spade said, referring to injuries like frostbite which can occur from not changing out of clothing drenched in sweat. And while hypothermia, snow blindness or dehydration are obvious threats in the cold, the manual also notes that heat exhaustion or heat stroke can be common if troops are overdressed for strenuous physical exercises like foot marches.
Modern battlefield challenges
In a potential conflict, troops will also be expected to go back to the basics and work without the latest 21st century technology. The cold can cause a “high rate of damage to all equipment” or simply leave other technologies not to work in the first place. For navigation, troops must be proficient in understanding how to use magnetic compasses, paper maps, dead-reckoning or celestial navigation — using the stars to guide them, according to the manual.
And similarly to newer battlefield disciplines like not using electronic devices to avoid giving away a unit’s position, troops in the cold have to consider heat signatures. The environment’s lack of natural camouflage, the use of warming shelters or even a troop’s snow tracks, can give away a unit’s position to adversaries. To counteract these pitfalls, the manual instructs troops to cover their tracks, use natural elements to conceal trenches and foxholes, and build dummy installations.
“You’re still using the same camo-covering concealment efforts that you would at Ranger school, but it’s just a matter of the consequences are worse here in an extreme cold weather environment because if you don’t do that, the enemy knows exactly where you went,” Spade said.
Beyond visual giveaways, sound also matters in the arctic environment.
“In the cold air, sound carries much farther than in temperate climates. Units keep all sounds to a minimum. Noise caused by motors, troops coughing, and skiers breaking through snow crust may warn the enemy of activity at extreme distances,” the manual states.
‘Weather is more of an impact’
Spade said the manual was built on lessons learned by soldiers who practiced real-life combat scenarios in Arctic conditions at the Joint Pacific Multinational Regional Training Center in Alaska.
“The weather is more of an impact than just the adversary,” said Spade, who led his battalion as the opposing force during a JPMRC training rotation in 2024. “Conversely, an element that is in the defense that has the ability to utilize the resources that they have available to them are going to far outweigh the advancing element that has to depend on long lines of communication, resources that are being consumed at a higher rate.”
But in Arctic combat, for both the offense and defense, logistics and sustainment are key because “everything takes so much longer and in extreme cold weather, movement in particular,” he said.
The manual states that units should prepare soldiers and marines to be able to “self-sustain” for at least 72 hours without access to medical support, communications or sustainment resources. The manual includes a Korean War example of the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir which lasted one and a half months. About 30,000 Marines, U.S. Army, Republic of Korea and United Kingdom troops were surprised and outnumbered by a Chinese force of 120,000. They endured temperatures between -20 °F and -40 °F, 5.5 hours of daylight at a time and frequent nighttime snowstorms.
Because American forces had trained for and experienced cold-weather combat during World War II, they had better clothing for the climate and were well fed compared to the Chinese who could not heat rice or make water. The U.S. lost 20% of its troops, while the Chinese army lost almost 42%, according to the manual.
Garibay said small mistakes in a more temperate environment can be an inconvenience, like finding food and other resources, but in the Arctic, they can be fatal.
“The Arctic is one of the few environments in the world where if you drop a unit there unprepared, within an hour, there’s a strong possibility that none of them will survive,” he said. “Whereas other environments, you can drop them in there and they’ll be in peril.”
Other off-beat Arctic tips
Along with chaplain’s wine and restricting band performances, the manual covers other arctic-only techniques and procedures that would likely never occur to soldiers trained only in temperate climes. The manual does not recommend melting snow for water, except in emergencies, because of the fuel needed. Instead locally sourced water should come from lakes and streams.
But some things never change. Soldiers and Marines can still get hit with a Uniformed Code of Military Justice order, according to the manual, since “no matter the location, units conduct legal services in the same manner.”
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