Greenland as Linchpin for Distributed Arctic Deterrence: Connecting security across the European and North American Arctic in the aftermath of the Greenland Agreement

Yeah.

So I think I'll start with the changed threat environment that we face in NATO, because after the Cold War, the Arctic became a low tension area, but that has obviously changed.

And all the while, since two thousand and fourteen really, Russia has been building up its Arctic capabilities to use it in a more military strategic way, which allows it to pose threats to Europe and the United States.

And that threat is complex, and that has to do also with technological developments.

So for example, aerial threats are more complex today.

The U.S. has a presence, uh, on Greenland.

It has the Pituffik Space Base, and that's really designed to intercept, detect, track, and intercept ballistic missiles.

But today we have other types of, of missiles, for example, cruise missiles.

And the problem with the old type of space base equipment is that if you try to set it up for detecting, uh, and tracking hypersonic missiles, you might not pick up the ballistic missile threats.

You can also, on nuclear warheads, use electronic warfare.

You can put in decoys so that it becomes harder to find out where and what is the threat and to, again, just detect the threat because you have decoys to confuse the adversary today.

And you can also overwhelm missile defenses.

For example, carry a lot of aerial drones on a seemingly civilian vessel, search and rescue vessel, or, you know, a container vessel could have aerial drones, and they are long range today.

We would use these long range attack drones, one-way drones, and you can overwhelm the sensors that the adversary have, and that way prevent us from detecting an incoming threat and, you know, confuse us and make us unable to do anything about the threat.

So the complexity of that threat is why you would want to have the sort of golden dome system that is mentioned in the agreement.

That's quite complex, and some of the technology is not developed yet.

So for example, you don't have satellites that can really effectively identify and track hypersonic cruise missiles, uh, moving target missiles.

So that challenge will take a decade for us to develop the satellite equipment needed.

But in the meantime, what you can do is use autonomous systems to try to get at some of these threats, and they need to be spread out over a larger area.

So one of the points of this paper is that you have to have your assets spread out, because if you, you know, put all your stuff into one base, then you're much more vulnerable.

So if you distribute all your assets over a larger area, you can always replace them.

So if the enemy hits, you know, stuff that is based in one area, you have another area with other systems and equipment that you can use.

So today you, you don't really want to put everything in one ba- base.

You want to spread it out.

So with regard to aerial threats, maybe you could have stationed MUSVs, so they're unmanned surface vessels that can carry sensors and that can also track some carriers of threats, and you can have unmanned airplanes that are able also to detect and track.