Arctic, Strategic Outlook, Territorial and Law of the Sea Disputes

NATO in the Arctic?

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By Andrew Chisholm

An appropriate presence?
                          An appropriate presence?

Canada’s recent assumption of the Chairmanship of the Arctic Council prompted much discussion of Arctic issues, including security, an important element of which is the ongoing tug-and-pull over whether NATO should play a role in the region. Russia is, unsurprisingly, opposed. But there is division within NATO itself: Canada against, Norway and other Nordic states for, and the United States seemingly unsure. These divisions are rooted in the varied nature of the Arctic security challenges that each state or group faces. Therefore Arctic security solutions must be equally tailored.

According to Rob Huebert of the University of Calgary, both Russia and the U.S. are viewing the Arctic in military-strategic terms. Russia aims to maintain its nuclear deterrent, including in the Arctic, through submarine-based missiles to be deployed in its Northern Fleet. Meanwhile the U.S. has bolstered its ballistic missile defence forces in Alaska, and maintains fighter and airlift squadrons as well as a naval submarine presence. Both see their own moves as crucial to national security, but likely view the other with concern, a mindset also prevalent among the Nordic states.

Norway has prioritized Northern defence, moving its operational headquarters to the High North in 2009 and working closely with other circumpolar states, including Russia. But Norway has also been pushing for a NATO presence there because of the importance of the Arctic and increasing interest around the world. It has likewise made clear that as Russia continues its military modernization, Norway sees an Arctic presence of NATO as crucial to continued Norway-Russia cooperation.

Norway’s concerns are similarly felt by Sweden and Finland, which have hosted U.S. and NATO training exercises and deepened ties with the Alliance, as well as by the Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia). This has lead to talk of a Nordic-Baltic alliance or perhaps even of British involvement. Regardless, it is clear that real deterrence of the interested countries’ more powerful neighbour depends on the wider NATO organization.

Top 'O the World to You
                            Top ‘O the World to You

These actions have caused concern in Russia where NATO, not to mention its expansion, has historically been viewed with suspicion. It is important that after a recent visit to Norway, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said that NATO would not increase its presence in the region. He also noted, though, the legitimacy of Norway’s expectation that NATO principles apply to all NATO territory, including its northern reaches. So it seems that while no increase in activity is imminent, neither is a reduction, and the Nordic states will almost certainly continue to seek greater NATO involvement. But while Norway and others have good reason to look to NATO, Canada has good reason to not want an Alliance presence.

With boundary disputes set to be resolved through the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea and all Arctic states saying that military activities are mainly to support of commercial and other civilian priorities, Canada’s desire, especially under the current government, is to see Arctic states focus primarily on economic development. Furthermore, despite sometimes harsh public rhetoric, Canada has a good economic working relationship with Russia it wishes to maintain, as the two countries have much to offer one another. Burgeoning NATO-Russia competition in the Arctic would undermine both those goals. But Canada cannot block U.S., Russian, or Nordic strategic aims, and so it must simply do what it can to defuse Arctic tensions: work to influence the means by which security is organized in the Arctic.

Whether or not the Nordic states achieve their goal of a greater northern NATO presence will depend on the keystone of the Alliance, the United States. In some ways NATO is an attractive option for the Americans, as five of the eight circumpolar states (Canada, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, the U.S.) are member states and the Nordic-Baltic states seem fully willing to contribute to the extent of their (relatively limited) capabilities. But, as its National Strategy for the Arctic Region indicates, the United States is no more interested in de-stabilizing the region than is Canada. Therefore a tension-creating NATO presence is neither ideal nor a foregone conclusion.

This presents Canada with an opportunity to promote an alternative to NATO: NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defence Command. The NORAD option is attractive for several reasons. In concrete terms, NORAD boasts a North America-specific defence architecture (NATO does not), a connection to ballistic missile defence, and an emerging focus on the maritime domain. Through these capacities, it can support both military-strategic and economic activities. In terms of perceptions, NORAD, while closely linked to NATO, is a separate organization. Whereas a NATO presence would stretch solidly from Alaska to the Nordic region, a degree of separation between northern North American and northern European security may present a less anti-Russian and less threatening posture. In the same vein, although it was established during the Cold War NORAD lacks some of the legacy of NATO, which for decades stood at the symbolic heart of East-West competition.

It is important to remember that warfare among the Arctic states is highly unlikely. And, while there will always be disagreements and competition among all states, much of the current Arctic tension is the result of uncertainty about the shape of the Arctic security structure going forward. The task for now is to ensure that the final shape settled on is the best one to calm existing tensions and manage future disputes.

Andrew Chisholm is a Junior Research Fellow at the Atlantic Council of Canada. He recently graduated from the University of King’s College with a B.A., Combined Honours, in Political Science and History, and studied Conflict Resolution at the Rothberg International School at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Andrew focuses his writing on contemporary Canadian foreign, defence, and security policy. His wider interests include sovereignty and governance, international diplomacy, and emerging security threats. Contact: andrewmchisholm@gmail.com

This article was cross-posted by permission from and appeared in its original form at the Atlantic Council of Canada. Any views or opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and the news agencies and do not necessarily represent those of the Atlantic Council of Canada.

Drones

Assessing UAV Survivability

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An oft-cited draw-back of unmanned air systems is their vulnerability to a variety of threats both physical, such as anti-aircraft fire, and electronic, including jamming. Researchers and industry are beginning to more seriously examine these threats as the number of drones operating proliferates.

How do UAVs stack up against these various threats, especially in the maritime environment?

On the physical front, depending on at what altitude they are operating, maritime UAVs face similar threats to helicopters and patrol aircraft. Small tactical UAS flying surveillance missions at relatively low altitudes over land or water are vulnerable to the simplest anti-aircraft threat, small arms fire. In 2011, a Fire Scout UAV operating from USS Halyburton (FFG 40) over Libya was shot down by some sort of ground fire. While flying over-water, drones might face close-in-weapons systems ranging from 20-30mm to larger naval guns in the 57mm-to-155mm range. Recently, Naval Post Graduate School (NPS) Systems Engineering – Test Pilot School Co-Op students Lieutenants Jacob King and Jared Wolcott completed research on ScanEagle survivability against small arms. Their analysis shows that the overall probability of kill (pk) in a given scenario may exceed 50% against a 12.7mm (.50 caliber) weapon, and that the greatest driving factor in the UAV’s survivability is its slant range to the threat. They recommend upgrades to optics modules to allow the aircraft to operate at higher altitudes which will reduce the probability of detection, increase aiming error and ballistic dispersion, and possibly eliminate small-arms threats altogether by flying above and outside enemy weapons range. Future low-altitude maritime UAS will also be vulnerable to shoot-down from directed energy weapons, such as the laser system which will deploy onboard USS Ponce (AFSB(I) 15) later this summer.

Moving up the spectrum of vulnerabilities, there are several publically released incidents which provide anecdotal evidence on combat losses of UAVs from surface-to-air missiles and manned aircraft. In August 1995, a Predator was shot down over Bosnia. Another Pred was shot down over Kosovo in May 1999 by a 1960s-era Soviet Strela surface-to-air missile. An Iraqi Mig-25 downed another MQ-1 over Iraq on December 23, 2002. The Air Force equipped some Predators with Stinger air-to-air missiles in 2002, but had little success countering the Iraqi air threat. In 2012, Iranian SU-25s tried unsuccessfully to shoot down U.S. Predators over the Arabian Gulf. Also in 2012, Israeli F-16s shot down an Iranian tactical UAV over Israeli territory, then did so again off the coast of Haifa in April 2013. Against modern naval SAMs, lower, slower-flying UAVs would likely be highly vulnerable.

There is little reason that compact chaff and flare systems could not be integrated onto most medium- and large-size UAS platforms to offer them some passive protection from these threats. Perhaps the highest-end protective system against shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles is the Directional Infrared Countermeasures (DIRCM), which has been fitted on a variety of U.S. fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft. DIRCM detects, tracks, and jams infra-red guided missiles using a FLIR and laser. Raytheon’s Common Infrared Counter-Measures (CIRCM) is designed to be lightweight enough for large UAS platforms. Higher-end UAVs, such as the X-47B, feature infrared and radar signature reduction characteristics, though these measures are not cost-effective on tactical UAVs.

Jamming, spoofing, and environments where communications links and even GPS navigation are jammed are an emerging threat to UAVs. On 4 December 2011, Iran’s cyber warfare unit allegedly brought down a U.S. RQ-170 surveillance UAV in some sort of controlled manner. Enhancing autonomy is one way to add resiliency to UAS operating in an electromagnetically-contested environment. Boeing performed some interesting work on bio-inspired autonomy with ScanEagles, one of the most numerous UAVs operating at sea today. The goal of this experimentation was for the UAVs operating in a swarm of vehicles to form a beyond line of site (BLOS) relay network. In addition to relaying UAV surveillance data and telemetry over-the-horizon without the use of satellite communications, the project demonstrated the ability of a ScanEagle to fly autonomously through a jammed environment, then exfiltrate the data collected via the BLOS relay once it exited the denied area. Read more here on UAV communications relays.

One primary desirable attribute of unmanned aircraft, especially smaller, less expensive types, is that combat losses are much more acceptable than with manned aircraft. Though as the NPS study notes, “the loss of a small UAV does not incur any loss of life or a large cost, the potential loss of the ISR mission it performs is becoming increasingly important to the combatant commanders. The survivability discipline must be applied to UAVs to ensure that these assets become more survivable and can complete their assigned missions in a higher threat environment.”

This article was re-posted by permission from, and appeared in its original form at NavalDrones.com.

New Initiatives

Our New Partners

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The beaches at Norrmandy
              The wind farms at Norrmandy, France

We here at CIMSEC are always looking for new partners to help keep you abreast of the maritime world from the various bits of the world. You’ll see our current partners over on the right-hand side under “Partners Sites.” Our newest comrades come from just across “the pond” over in the UK and France.

The first is ThinkDefense, a non-partisan U.K. website much like ours, which aims to encourage debate, writing, and analysis among writers of various outlooks and bring the best of it to you. Did you know that the Royal Navy has its sights set on a leap forward in replenishment-at-sea capabilities, that there are no real “tall ships” for training in the Royal Navy, or, less seriously, which British ship plays the U.N. command ship USS Argus in the upcoming movie World War Z?

The second is the blog of the prolific French reporter Philippe Chapleau, “Lignes de Défense” or “Lines of Defense”. He provides an excellent mix of analysis on a variety of defense issues from front-line warfare to homefront anecdotes. For example, did you know that the Cherbourg Naval Base celebrated its 200th anniversary this past weekend, that a controversial wind turbine project is going up off of the beaches of Normandy, or that you can sign a petition to register the beaches as a UNESCO World Heritage Site? Did you know what NATO exercise just concluded on the French frigate Aconite or that American company AdvanFort as a greater counter-piracy presence off Somalia than the more widely publicized British group Typhon? Well if you did, you’re smarter than me (admittedly not the greatest measure of intelligence), but we’re happy to plug into ThinkDefence’s and Philippe’s knowledge and help bring it to you.

Tactical Concepts

Putting the Human in Information Dominance

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Where would Col John Boyd locate tactical information synthesis?
Where would Col John Boyd locate tactical information synthesis?

Building on the concepts of Col John Boyd1, the U.S. Navy’s Navy Doctrine Publication (NDP) 6, Naval Command and Control describes the decision-making process as a recurring cycle of observe-orient-decide-act (OODA). A human decision maker that can process this cycle quickly, observing and reacting to unfolding events more rapidly than an opponent, can thereby get inside the opponent’s decision cycle and gain the advantage.

As Boyd noted: “Machines don’t fight wars. Terrain doesn’t fight wars. Humans fight wars. You must get into the mind of humans. That’s where the battles are won.”2

According to NDP-6 the humans that make command decisions at the tactical level are the Composite Warfare Commander (CWC) and his/her principal warfare commanders. The Composite Warfare Commander is the central command authority and overall commander. Under the CWC architecture, the Officer in Tactical Command (OTC) delegates command authority in particular warfare areas to subordinate commanders within the CWC organization including: Sea Combat Commander (SCC), Surface Warfare Commander (SUWC), Undersea Warfare Commander (USWC), Air Warfare Commander (AWC), Information Warfare Commander (IWC), Strike Warfare Commander (STWC), and Mine Warfare Commander (MIWC). To dominate in combat, information has to be integrated, presented to, and easily understood by these humans.

This integration of combat information3 has to occur once and, from all indications, onboard ship in order to realize the advantage of superior information and gain the decision/time advantage. When not in EMCON, this knowledge in the mind of the commander is derived primarily from combat information from tactical unit/force (aka “organic”) sensor systems and, to a lesser degree from sensor systems external to the force. The reverse is the case when operating in EMCON. The integration of combat information from external active and passive sensor systems with information from a tactical force’s passive sensor systems dramatically increases the potential for continued information superiority and tactical advantage.

The Navy Strategy for Information Dominance 2013-2027 contains Objective 3.3: “Integrate all-source information across kill chains”. It states: “Disparate information sources will necessarily span physical locations, security classifications and Navy warfighting domains, but they must be synthesized4 to create actionable knowledge.”  The Strategy doesn’t indicate where this integration will occur, or whether sensor information from tactical-force sensors will be included.  If integration of only external sensor information, the resulting product would at best be incomplete, at worst misleading, delivered late to the tactical user; and, in a form not suitable for further integration (de-correlation/re-correlation) with information from tactical sensors.  If the concept is for organic sensor information to be communicated to some rear area facility for integration with external sensor information and disseminated back to the fleet then there are multiple negative implications. These include communications loading and vulnerabilities, OPSEC considerations, and especially time delays. If presented with two or more separate “pictures of the situation” based on the integration of different sets of information, tactical commanders will still have to mentally synthesize multiple situation awareness inputs – a recipe for misinterpretation, delay and loss of tactical advantage.

As stated in the Strategy:“The Information Dominance pillar can be our most powerful asset, or it can be our greatest liability. If we integrate it intelligently, and if we execute it correctly, we will be able to seize the operational initiative, gain tactical advantage, and win future battles with overwhelming speed.”  The “we” has to include not only the Information Dominance Corps, but also the Surface Warfare community and the requirements and acquisitions organizations charged with getting combat systems on surface ships right.

To paraphrase Boyd: Information doesn’t fight wars. Humans fight wars. Information must get into the mind of humans. That’s where dominance occurs and battles are won.

Dick Mosier is a recently retired defense contractor systems engineer; Naval Flight Officer; OPNAV N2 civilian analyst; SES 4 responsible for oversight of tactical intelligence systems and leadership of major defense analyses on UAVs, Signals Intelligence, and C4ISR.  His interest is in improving the effectiveness of U.S. Navy tactical operations, with a particular focus on organizational seams, a particularly lucrative venue for the identification of long-standing issues and dramatic improvement. The article represents the author’s views and is not necessarily the position of the Department of Defense or the United States Navy. 

1. The OODA Loop was developed by Col John R. Boyd, USAF (Ret), An Organic Design for Command and Control, A Discourse on Winning and Losing. Unpublished lecture notes, August 1987.

2. John Boyd, quoted by Henry Eason, “New Theory Shoots Down Old War Ideas,” Atlanta Constitution, March 22, 1981

3. Joint Pub 2-01: “Combat information: Unevaluated data, gathered by or provided directly to the tactical commander which, due to its highly perishable nature or the criticality of the situation, cannot be processed into tactical intelligence in time to satisfy the user’s tactical intelligence requirements.”

4. Joint Pub 1-02: “Synthesis: In intelligence usage, the examining and combining of processed information with other information and intelligence for final interpretation.”

Fostering the Discussion on Securing the Seas.