Navy Plans to be More Active in the Arctichttps://www.ktoo.org/2019/05/04/navy-plans-to-be-more-active-in-the-arctic/https://www.defensenews.com/news/your-military/2019/05/06/northcom-arctic-now-americas-first-line-of-defense/ The U.S. Navy is increasing its presence in the Arctic, and Navy Secretary Richard Spencer said he’d like to send a ship through the Northwest Passage this summer.
“We’re still exploring to see if we could do a full passage. There’s still ice up there in some places,” Spencer told a U.S. Senate Appropriations subcommittee this week.... Spencer said his wake-up call came at his first Arctic Council meeting, shortly after he became secretary of the Navy in 2017.
“It truly was an eye-opener for me,” Spencer said, “because sitting across the table was our Russian counterpart, talking about the 10,000 spetsnaz (special operations troops) he has up there, and the runways that he’s bringing back to life for ‘search and rescue.’”
The secretary made air quotes with his fingers, suggesting he doesn’t believe the build up is just for civilian purposes.
Russian forces are preparing to monitor airspace and secure the Northern Sea Route, which has the potential to turn the Arctic into a geostrategic thoroughfare on par with the Strait of Malacca — a major shipping channel connecting the Indian and Pacific oceans — and the Suez Canal, according to the U.S. Coast Guard....
The U.S. Navy added Arctic exercises in 2018 and 2019 and is planning more. Spencer said the Navy and Marines are considering using Adak for an exercise in September.
“While we do not have a requirement for a port, yes, having a deepwater port such as Nome would be an advantage in the area.”-----------------------------------
Admiral: The US Is ‘Operating Blind’ In the Arctichttps://www.defenseone.com/technology/2019/05/admiral-us-operating-blind-arctic/156781/U.S. defense officials announced at the Sea Air Space forum here on Monday that September Arctic sea ice is receding at a rate of roughly 13 percent per decade. ... When it comes to predicting fluctuations in Arctic weather, the United States is “operating in the blind,” the U.S. Navy’s chief meteorologist said Monday.The northern polar region is heating up about twice as fast as the rest of the globe, creating wildly variable weather and conditions that don’t happen anywhere else. As climate change makes the Arctic more accessible, the Navy’s ships, subs, and aircraft need better weather models to help them operate in the region’s chaotic seas, Rear Adm. John Oko told an audience at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space conference on Monday.
Okon said relatively small atmospheric events in the Arctic, sometimes called polar lows, can be as dangerous as hurricanes at lower latitudes. They “develop quick and move really fast,” he said.
Over the next three years, the Navy Research Lab, NOAA, and other partners will work to develop better predictions through the
Earth System Prediction Capability, which Oko described as “a national effort to develop and deliver a fully-coupled air, ocean, ice and land models.”
... “In the Arctic, traditional sensors that provide the bulk of observations in the mid and low [latitude locations] just don’t work,” he said. “Things like geostationary satellites that provide the environmental observations, gliders, argo floats; they don’t provide the access or persistency required of the Arctic Ocean,” he said.
As a result, the Navy doesn’t have the hard data to make predictive models run as well as they are supposed to. “The current amount of observations that we have in the Arctic are similar to the amount of observations we had over the U.S. and in the Atlantic during WWI,” he said.“One of the limiting factors for unmanned vehicles right now is battery technology. Right?” He says he’s looking for “low-cost persistent sensors that can operate…in the upper two or three hundred meters where the runoff from the Ice and the snowpack from the land are affecting that acoustic signature.”
...
Native Alaskans have an acute understanding of ice-flow, melting conditions and shifting weather patterns, Okon said.
“We need them. I need to tap into that local knowledge," said Navy Rear Adm. John Okon, commander of Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command.
“Leveraging indigenous people’s knowledge to operate up there is critical for us.”
Tapping into that knowledge will be critical because the region remains an operational enigma for much of the military, he added.
