The U.S. military is bracing for the possibility that it may have to fight a literal cold war, and there are concerns that the perishable skills needed to succeed in that environment have expired.
That might explain why earlier this year, the Army and Marine Corps worked together to publish their first official Arctic Warfare manual in over 50 years. As with other military publications on doctrine, it’s dense. The 267-page manual covers the nitty-gritty of cold weather combat like ambushes and evacuations, but it also hits on other more off-beat scenarios, like how chaplains can keep their wine warm for religious ceremonies and a warning that Army bands shouldn’t perform outside in the frozen wasteland of the Arctic because, well, it’s very freaking cold.
To prepare for that, U.S. forces are relearning the fundamentals of cold weather combat, like how to build military-grade skis for Apaches and rotating units through crash courses at the Northern Warfare Training Center in Alaska. For more advanced lessons, the Army is sending units to winter wargames alongside NATO allies in Finland, putting their skills to the test against soldiers who know the ins and outs of fighting in the extreme cold.
This push to prepare for a war near the North Pole comes as declining sea ice exposes more resources and opens new potential trade routes to whichever nation can secure them first. As both Russia and China make inroads in the Arctic Circle, it made sense for us to look at how the U.S. plans to compete and make up for lost ground and what that will mean for those service members training or operating in that environment.
Each week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, Task & Purpose will be bringing in military veterans to host segments on different topics. These will range from breakdowns of tactics and doctrine to explainers on new tech and weapons systems, but each will be researched, reported and reviewed by the journalists on the Task & Purpose team. And as with the stories we cover on the website, these videos will look at these topics from a rank-and-file perspective — which means they’ll aim to answer the question: Why does this matter to a junior service member about to deploy to [name a country], or will have to use [name a weapon system] or deal with [name a problem or threat.]
In this week’s video, August Dannehl, a Navy veteran and head of video production for Task & Purpose and our sister sites, The War Zone and We Are The Mighty, walks viewers through cold warfare, what a fight in the Arctic may look like, and what challenges the U.S. military may be up against.
If you enjoyed this week’s video, please hop on over to our YouTube channel and follow the team there. And because this post is about the Arctic, here’s your obligatory cold-weather pun: Stay frosty. (I’m sorry.)
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