Arctic Action

Earlier this month, Inside the Pentagon reported on a Defense Department study about the Arctic. That assessment identified gaps in the military's Arctic capabilities that could be costly to fix, but stopped short of urging significant investment in high-tech solutions amid a major effort by the White House and the Defense Department to slash security spending over the next decade. Further:

"What we did do was look across the mission sets and identify where we think there are gaps," a defense official said, noting the gaps have to do with "not-very-glamorous" but "really foundational" capabilities like "awareness and communication" that can be "quite costly to invest in, in a really robust kind of way."

DOD will "need to make investments" in these areas "in the coming decade," the official said. But the study's executive summary avoids making investment recommendations to fix DOD's capability gaps and the Coast Guard's shortfall in icebreaking capability.

"Given the many competing demands on DOD's resources in the current fiscal environment, the department believes that further evaluation of operating environment is required before entertaining significant investments in infrastructure or capabilities," the summary states.

The Pentagon is in the midst of developing a strategy for implementing President Obama's call to cut security spending by $400 billion by fiscal year 2023. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said this effort must determine which military missions can be cut without incurring too much risk.

"The Arctic is warming on average twice as fast as the rest of the planet, resulting in increased human activity in the region," the report summary states.

The Arctic is not a "military-lead arena," the defense official said when noting the State Department helped the Pentagon's policy shop prepare the DOD report to Congress on Arctic operations and the Northwest Passage. But the official balked at the notion of eliminating DOD Arctic missions, arguing the capability to operate in the region is vital for defending U.S. territory.

At the time, all we had to share was the report's executive summary.

Now, however, we have the full report.