CDR Salamander suggests we tilt our globes (you have a globe on your desk, don’t you?) 90 degrees and consider the Arctic Ocean:
First things first, as it is the focus of the report, let’s go to the chart room and properly define the, “Central Arctic Ocean”.
There it is, the horizontally shaded bit outside everyone’s EEZ.
The chart comes from the report in question by RAND: The Future of Maritime Presence in the Central Arctic Ocean.
Before we dive in — and the Front Porch knows exactly where I am going here — I need to point out again what we see at the very top where all the red, green, and blue lines intersect. You can’t miss it, and it should have you screaming to whatever direction The Pentagon is from where you sit.
Yes kiddies, that is the Bering Strait, half of which is ours, and the other side is Russia. As you move from the Arctic into the greater Pacific or from the Pacific to the Arctic, you have to pass through that strait, and before it the American Aleutian Islands.
As we’ve covered here before, we have criminally avoided leveraging the blessings of the geography bequeathed to our nation, that of controlling both the inner and outer gates to the Arctic Ocean from the Pacific.
I should not have to explain to you the importance of the Arctic shores of Alaska to anyone. Challengers to the security of our resources in the north, both old and new, are back on the scene. We are a decade late in building a base at Nome and reactivating Adak. I covered that in a previous Substack linked in the prior sentence. Read it and come back if you need to catch up.
A weakness of much of the RAND report is, it is mostly based on stale talking points about immediate climate change in the Arctic, and questionably alarmist assumptions about the Arctic climate for the rest of the century, which seem more suited to the first Obama Administration, but put this to the side.
Should the climate in the Arctic mid-century trend towards the more ice or less, the simple facts remain — the competition in the Arctic is only increasing and the time to act on this new reality is now.
