NGA - National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
NGA - National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
30/07/2024 | News release | Distributed by Public on 30/07/2024 14:50
Strategic Competition in the Arctic Heats Up as Sea Ice Shifts
SPECIAL REPORT - PART 1: Strategic Competition in the Arctic Heats Up as Sea Ice Shifts
Since the earliest Russian and U.S. trade and diplomatic negotiations of the 1800s, the resource-rich Arctic has been a focal point for strategic competition.
Now, the rapid melting of sea ice is making the Arctic more accessible than ever, creating new economic opportunities and military challenges. NGA is front and center in this U.S. national security mission, providing crucial Arctic mapping, monitoring and navigation products and services needed for decision advantage in the region.
The Arctic sits strategically between the northern Pacific Ocean, the northern Atlantic Ocean and the continental land masses of North America, Asia and Europe. It serves as the northernmost approach to the U.S. homeland. As competition to shape the region's future has intensified, both Russia and China present a definite challenge and potential threat to the United States through their actions in the Arctic.
Russia - the largest Arctic nation by landmass, population and military presence above the Arctic Circle - continues to view itself as the preeminent Arctic power and accordingly is building new bases and refurbishing its old infrastructure. Russia also is making claims to regulate certain waters of the Northern Sea Routes, although its claims are both unfounded and in violation of international law. Meanwhile, the People's Republic of China, or PRC, which calls itself a "near Arctic nation," is increasingly asserting itself, including by constructing research facilities in the region that could serve both civilian and military purposes.
As Arctic competition has increased, so too has the need to understand the impact of the region's changes - a vital task NGA is performing to help protect the security interests of the U.S. and its allies.
ArcticDEM Map. Courtesy of the ArcticDEM Project.
Climate change and environmental degradation will contribute to and reflect a more contested geopolitical environment. Countries and other actors are likely to compete over food, mineral, water and energy sources made more accessible, more valuable or more scarce.
For example, receding Arctic sea ice is opening new sea routes and opportunities to access valuable resources there, including natural gas and oil deposits, rare earth metals and fish stocks.
As a result, the existing focus on access to the Northern Sea Route along Russia's territorial waters and the Northwest Passage along the Canadian territorial waters is expanding to a possible game-changing Transpolar Sea Route that would connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans across the Arctic Ocean.
These routes could offer greater numbers of navigable days and possibly even ice-free summers in the Arctic Ocean as early as 2034, according to some reports.
A fully navigable Arctic Ocean would open the door to even more complicated freedom-of-navigation and operations issues, as well as territorial and boundary concerns among world powers seeking military and trade advantages, and NGA is doing important work to help the U.S. prepare to address these issues.
For example, the agency in December 2022 completed a multi-year program to map all of the claimed maritime limits and boundaries in the region. Also, an NGA-developed capability now in the evaluation phase is using machine learning and automated methods to detect sea ice through unclassified satellite imagery, replacing slower manual methods.
As sea ice in the Arctic melts and makes the region more accessible, the amount of shipping traffic continues to increase as well.
A Closer Look at Russia and China
Russia and China both see climate change as an advantage because it will afford them greater access to resources previously inaccessible in the Arctic region.
Aside from the increased usage of the Northern Sea Route, Russia's Arctic strategy discusses the potential for greater agriculture and mining in the region than was previously possible. One example of this is a 2021 deal for a company to extract gold in the Kyuchus field near Tiksi, which includes the construction of a small nuclear power plant.
Russia's leaders consider the Arctic a key resource base and have developed an Arctic strategy based largely on improving Russia's military posture in the region, exploiting the region's vast oil and natural gas deposits and maintaining key Arctic maritime shipping lanes.
However, climate change also presents new challenges for Russia. Reports estimate that approximately 60% of the Russian federation is built on permafrost, which is thawing during longer and hotter summers in higher latitudes and is affecting global infrastructure.
NGA helps provide insight into this issue. In fact, NGA's climate cell provided strategic guidance to a Johns Hopkins academic study published in May 2023 on the agency's Tearline publication about how permafrost thaw is affecting Russian Arctic airfields - damaging Russian airfields and other Russian infrastructure in the High North. In addition, agency researchers are working on an innovative effort with academia, the U.S. Geological Survey and other partners to track ground instability from permafrost thaw by monitoring terrain subsidence.
Meanwhile, China continues to assert its position as a near-Arctic state and considers the Arctic and Antarctic as key resource and scientific research areas.
For example, as part of its Belt and Road Initiative, China is increasing its activity in the polar regions by setting up research stations in Antarctica, investing in mining and energy opportunities, and working with Russia to create a new sea route through the Arctic Ocean.
The PRC also has made investments in Russia's Yamal natural gas project, and in 2019 China's CNOOC Ltd and CNPC agreed to buy a combined 20% stake in the $25.5 billion Arctic-2 liquefied natural gas project led by Russian gas producer Novatek.
The U.S. Strategy in the Arctic
Because the Arctic is important to U.S. national security interests primarily in terms of freedom-of-navigation, energy and environmental concerns, and peaceful exploration, the U.S. is working with other nations who follow an international rules-based order in the Arctic, both as individual nations and as an Arctic collective. NATO, the eight nations of the Arctic Council - Canada, Denmark - via Greenland, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the U.S. - via Alaska - the Arctic Security Round Table and others remain crucial to U.S. success.
NGA participates in several intelligence-sharing partnerships for Arctic security within DOD, the IC and our allies.
For example, the limited number of U.S. icebreakers makes operating in a heavily iced Arctic challenging. Whereas Russia has 55 active icebreakers, according to the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Climate, the U.S. has only three vessels.
However, through partnerships and combined capabilities, the DOD is taking steps to ensure the U.S. can remain competitive in the region, such as continuing investments in the U.S. Coast Guard's improved icebreaker capabilities, including those commercially available.
DOD and NATO continue to invest in and to prioritize their Arctic and cold weather capabilities, including improved domain awareness; shared data accessibility; national and airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; warning; maneuverability and survivability, and NGA plays a key role in these efforts.
As VADM Frank Whitworth told an audience at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado in July 2023, collecting geospatial data on the Arctic is critical to maintaining our strategic advantage in the region, and our influence there will continue to grow.
"Understanding the world, for us, means understanding the places where change is happening at a rapid pace, and I think all of us would agree this is a place where change is happening the fastest,'' he explained during one of the forum's panels.
"Our stake in this is to ensure everyone has knowledge and understanding of the domain," Whitworth said. "It's not a very intel-rich domain, so the observations that we render are going to be the basis of what everybody uses to make decisions and collaborate with our partners."
One thing has become quite clear as the U.S. seeks to protect its interests in the Arctic - both military and non-military: GEOINT is essential for domain awareness in the region … and NGA is crucial for providing that GEOINT.
The agency is well-suited to support this important work, given its expertise, unique capabilities and range of partnerships, said James Griffith, director of NGA's Source Operations and Management component.
"We use our accurate knowledge of the Earth to provide decisionmakers with the information they need to make Arctic- and climate-related defense and policy decisions of consequence,'' Griffith said.
As Part 1 of this special report has shown, the Arctic holds a strategic significance for assuring the security of our nation and our allies. In turn, NGA has fully focused GEOINT expertise on the region and fully supported U.S. military and non-military activities and capabilities there. In Part 2, we will explore the many ways the agency is carrying out its Arctic mission and how its products and services are playing an essential role in the region's future.