 Welcome to the U.S. Naval War College, the Navy's home of thought. NWC Talks features our world-class experts examining national security matters. We hope you enjoy the conversation. Earlier this year, a group of cruise ship passengers hoping for a glimpse of arctic wonders got entirely more than they bargained for. Harrowing seas, howling winds, precarious rescues. The Viking sky's voyage from the arctic city of Tromsø ended abruptly when the ship encountered high seas and the captain had to issue a made-a-call. The ship came within 300 feet of running aground near the rocky shores of Hustadvika, Norway. The winds were 69 miles an hour, waves reached 40 feet, lifeboats had to turn back because of what one pilot called brutal conditions. Only 500 of the 1,300 passengers were airlifted by helicopter at night and with high winds roaring and experienced the mostly elderly passengers described as terrifying. No one died, but there are plenty of YouTube clips of sliding furniture, broken windows, and old folks getting winched up into helicopters. This is not a one-off. The melting ice has spawned a wave of so-called last chance tourism, bringing more than a million visitors a year to the arctic. I'm Mary Thompson Jones, a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. This is NWC Talks, and I'm inviting you to join me in imagining the arctic. So let's consider a few of the lesser-known facts about the arctic region. The arctic ocean is the world's smallest and shallowest. The arctic is a desert, virtually no precipitation. The arctic, by far, is not the coldest place on earth, Antarctica is. The arctic also has the world's least salty ocean. The arctic is both a sea and a terrestrial area, and only a small percentage of the arctic has actually been charted to modern international navigational standards. Most importantly of all, the United States has 1,100 miles of arctic coastline on the north slope of Alaska, making us a true arctic nation. So speaking of geography, where exactly is the arctic? Technically, the arctic begins at 66 degrees 34 minutes north latitude. Why there? Because that's the point at which the sun is visible at both of the solstices. Nations to the south find this 66 degree line somewhat arbitrary. The U.K. has been active for centuries in the arctic, and it calls itself a high north state, routinely sends its Royal Navy out into arctic waters. China declares itself as a near arctic nation, and it has charted a polar silk route to underscore that point. So who gets to be a so-called arctic state? Well, it helps to tilt the grove and take a circular tour from the top down, starting at the north pole. You see the Alaskan and Russian land masses reaching out to each other across a mere 51 miles of the Bering Strait, making the arctic ocean on the western side appear almost to be a lake. The sturdy solidness of Canada dissolves into some 19,000 islands, with the Russian side arcing around more than half of the arctic ocean seemingly more cohesive. Russian land is clearly closer to Canada than to Europe. Iceland floats alone, unattached, barely whisking the man-made dotted line labeled Arctic Circle. Norway stretches Evernorthward, cutting off arctic ocean access for its arctic neighbors Sweden and Finland. But the arctic is more than just a maritime domain. It has a terrestrial aspect with mountains, tundra, rivers, wildlife. The arctic is a stew of fresh and salt water. Its icebergs form far away on land, made of frozen freshwater, travel hundreds of miles until they break away and float into the ocean. Let's go back to an earlier image from 2007. In August 1st, Russian submarines descended more than two miles under the arctic to plant a Russian flag near the North Pole on the Lomonosov ridge. The event was extensively covered on Russian television, and two parliamentarians on board crowed about the significance declaring that this act proved the arctic is Russian. The rest of the world was skeptical. The Russian stunt lingers because it was an early salvo in what has revved up to be new evidence of great power competition. The United States is unprepared and is being challenged in the arctic as never before, militarily, economically, politically, and environmentally. So let's talk about the environment. Let's use a phrase that is uniquely suited to describe what is happening in the arctic right now, ice melt. For more than a century, the US and other arctic powers were able to relegate the region to the back burner because it was frozen, nearly solid, nearly impenetrable, and most people thought it had little strategic, economic, or political value. Then, in the early 1980s, satellites began photographing the region on a regular basis. Soon, analysts had trend lines showing how dynamic the region really was. The photos corroborated many other kinds of scientific data painstakingly collected year by year. Within a few decades, the photographic evidence began to mount, and today it is incontrovertible. We can still debate the why, but the fact is vast amounts of ice are melting in changing the arctic at such a rate that many parts of it will be ice-free very soon. There is less ice this year in the Beaufort Sea, which lies just above Alaska, than at any time in the last 40 years. Greenland is losing about 250 billion tons of ice each year. Old ice, much of it lost forever, has been replaced by much thinner new ice, which forms and melts within a single year. What would an ice-free arctic look like? Well, economically, there would be shorter shipping routes that are access to undersea oil, gas, and minerals, changing fishing patterns, and an increase in global investment. The human dimension would include an increase in human activity, including tourism, but it would also include damage to the infrastructure that would be particularly difficult for humans. There would be thawing permafrost, buckling roads and buildings, population migration, erosion and potential loss of coastal villages all along the arctic sea coast. Environmentally, we'd see more icebergs, we'd see an increase in extreme weather events, and unpredictable changes for animal and plant species. But the real issue that we're interested in is the political and military dimension. We'd see the entry of more out-of-region competitors, an increase in great power competition, and inevitable militarization of the region. Let's go back to the 2007 moment when Russia planted that flag. And fast forward to the present. What has happened in the intervening time? Well, the numbers tell the story of Russia's push to dominate the region. Vladimir Putin has created a new arctic command, four new brigade combat teams, 14 new airfields, 16 new deepwater seaports, and boasts the world's largest fleet of 40 icebreakers with 11 more on the way. Russia has refurbished old bases, created new ones, just open, severity-clever on Kotelnay Island has the largest building in the circumpolar arctic. Russia has been robust about using its assets, going beyond what is purely defensive, sometimes harassing neighbors in the Baltic, creating friction and unease with Norway, Sweden, and Finland. It has hosted massive exercises and contributed to a sense that the arctic is becoming militarized. Russia's industrial dominance in the arctic, based largely on oil and gas, has also grown as it builds new technology to handle liquefied petroleum and liquefied natural gas from a massive new terminal on the Yamal Peninsula, largely financed by the Chinese. But Russia has two other assets that greatly improve its position. One is the North Sea route, which hugs the Russian coastline and is becoming evermore navigable and ice-free. Russia and other trading nations are eyeing it as an economic and time-saving alternative to the Suez Canal. Russia has something else too, which the West lacks. Russia has people. It has cities such as Murmansk, Borkuta, and Norilsk. The population of these cities is larger than the entire U.S., Canada, and Greenland towns and villages combined. Russia is heavy investment not only in Russia, but Iceland, Sweden, Greenland, and elsewhere, which is coming as well from China. So let's talk about the U.S.'s other competitor in the region. China put the world on notice in early 2018 that it considers itself a near-arctic state. China's white papers and subsequent policy papers have put words to the deeds. China has invested heavily throughout the Arctic region in a bid to build a Chinese silk road and make an economic foothold. Its entry into the Arctic domain belies its claims of being only interested in commerce and shipping. China bought its first icebreaker from Ukraine, then built a second, and is now building a third that is nuclear-powered. And China's steadily increasing economic investments may well lead to a military presence in order to protect them. So what does all this mean for the United States? The flippant answer is very little, unless and until Americans embrace their identity as an arctic nation. America's lack of factual knowledge about the Arctic has created a real vacuum in understanding the region. Typical public misperceptions include the notion that the Arctic is always dark, always cold, and always full of ice. Traditional public opinion polls show Americans' knowledge of the Arctic with dismaying results. Only about 18% of respondents were able to correctly answer and identify the United States as a country which has territory with thousands of people living north of the Arctic Circle. But lack of public knowledge is directly related to a lack of national discussion and lack of direction as a crucial issue. There are signs that the U.S. has begun to grapple with the problem of the Arctic. Often the conversation dwells on a single issue, such as America's astounding lack of icebreakers. Various branches of the military, the Coast Guard, the Navy, the Department of Defense as a whole have all taken a stab at writing arctic strategy papers. Members of Congress, not surprisingly the Alaska delegation, have proposed everything from a deep water port in Nome to a national arctic agency. Think tanks have weighed in, and the volume of white papers, blue ribbon panels, and conferences has exploded. Beyond Washington, NATO has staged military exercises at the largest since the end of the Cold War in the Arctic. And indigenous people from several countries, Americans among them, are speaking out on how their lives have been affected by the melting ice. Scientists are making more effort to explain their findings to policymakers, and through better websites they are reaching out to the larger public with more easily understandable data. There have been a few stumbles, too. The U.S.'s opportunity to set a new course at the Intergovernmental Arctic Councilmeanor Stereo in Finland in 2019 fell flat, as it stumbled very publicly over wording on climate change. An attempt to showcase a new diplomatic presence in Greenland was sidelined as the Secretary of State was pulled away at the last minute to more pressing issues in other regions of the world. These developments, both good and bad, come late in the day. There is no single state in the United States, no single government agency that can possibly reorient the nation's attention to the North. It has to come from Americans themselves, imagining the Arctic and realizing their own Arctic heritage. Thank you for spending time with me today, imagining the Arctic. I'm Professor Mary Thompson Jones, and this has been NWC Talks.