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Arctic, Global Analysis

Staying Ahead of the Arctic Thaw

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Based on the warming trend in the Arctic Region, large portions of the Arctic Ocean are projected to be seasonally ice free by mid-century; between 2030 and 2050.  This warming trend carries with it the risks and opportunities associated with seasonal access to the Arctic Ocean, rivers, and coastline which includes mineral deposits, petroleum resources, fishing stocks, and economically advantageous shipping routes.  The central question is how the United States should prepare for the effects of a potential seasonal thaw of Arctic ice by mid-century.

US National Interest

Seasonal access to the Arctic Ocean significantly impacts US national interests.  It has the potential to increase national economic security, encourage global economic stability, and create new theaters for global leadership in international cooperation.

arctic1The Arctic region is estimated to have over $1 trillion worth of precious minerals and the equivalent to 812 billion barrels of oil.  All of which will become increasingly available for extraction.  The U.S. could make great strides toward energy independence by developing these resources within its Arctic territory and Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).

Actors and Governance

1.         Actors

The actors involved in strategic prepositioning for the Arctic thaw fall into two categories.  The Primary Actors hold legal rights to Arctic territory in accordance with internationally accepted legal structures.  These include the Arctic Nations (United States, Russia, Canada, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark) and indigenous populations (Athabasca, Inuit, Saami, etc.).  Influential Actors have significant stakes in Arctic policy outcomes but do not hold legal rights.  While some such actors may not yet be apparent, the most obvious are large environmental advocacy groups and multinational corporations in the energy, mining, shipping, and fishing industries.

2.         Governance

Governance in the Arctic Region, particularly the maritime domain, remains in nascent form.  The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) broadly applies international law but does not address unique requirements for Arctic shipping.  For example, there are no ship construction specifications or crew proficiency requirements for sailing within proximity to ice fields.  Under the United Nations charter, the International Maritime Organization has begun to analyze potential Arctic regulatory actions.

The Arctic Council was established in 1996 as an intergovernmental forum to coordinate Arctic policy and resolve disputes diplomatically. This forum does not establish international law but provides a venue for Arctic Nations to settle bilateral or multilateral disputes as well as coordinate initiatives to be brought before the International Maritime Organization.

At the national level, laws pertaining to environmental protection and the rights of indigenous peoples produce a complicated legal landscape the policy makers will have to navigate in coming years.  Shell’s recent decision to postpone drilling operations in the Alaskan Arctic highlights this tension.

Considerations

1.         Unclear Impacts of the Thaw

While a seasonal ice-free thaw by mid-century is generally accepted, several second order effects remain controversial or unpredictable.  The total magnitude of shipping traffic, intensity of mineral and oil extraction, as well as weather impacts on fishing stocks and agricultural growing conditions are not commonly understood.

arctic2Most shipping estimates focus on the economically viable trans-Arctic shipping traffic between North Asia and Europe.  By 2030, 1.4 million TEU (twenty-foot equivalent unit) could be transported across the Arctic on 480 total transits.  By 2050, a potential 2.5 million TEU could be transported across the Arctic on 850 total transits.  The wide array of other potential waterborne activities (i.e., commercial fishing, offshore drilling/exploration service traffic, and tourism) is not adequately captured in shipping estimates.

The Arctic warming trend could increase fishing stocks and shift populations northward, thus bringing with it commercial fishing fleets.  This trend also may improve agricultural growing conditions across the Siberian plain and allow waterborne bulk transport of product via Arctic rivers.  All of these activities could sharply increase the seasonal shipping density in the Arctic.

2.         Delicate and Extreme Environment

The Arctic is an extremely fragile ecosystem.  The risk of ecological disasters associated with resource extraction and transport will greatly impact the legal framework as well as rate and costs of development for exploitation of Arctic natural resources.

Human disasters will be just as likely.  As Arctic infrastructure and maritime traffic increases, so increases the need for responding to human distress.  Relief or Search and Rescue efforts in a region with significant radio interference and decreased satellite and GPS coverage will require a multi-national collaboration.

Policy Path Options

The United States can choose from three policy paths: a market-led policy, a regulatory-led, or a blended policy.  A market-led path would place the government in more of a reactionary role by regulating as industries develop.  A regulatory-led path would establish constraints or enablers ahead of industry to guide market development.  The blended path would regulate areas of critical priority ahead of industry but otherwise allow the markets to develop naturally.

Potential Naval Efforts

While national policy seeks to minimize the militarization of the Arctic, the United States Navy could still play a significant role in the development and organization of Arctic maritime shipping management.

1.         Lead an Interagency effort to develop infrastructure and regulations to ensure safe navigations of Arctic waters.

At the national level, the Navy could identify site and asset requirements for comprehensive Maritime Domain Awareness across all U.S. arctic territory and EEZ to include weather and ice forecasting suitable for navigation.  Once these requirements are identified, the Navy could lead efforts to construct a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the U.S. Coast Guard, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management in order to develop definitions of roles and responsibilities as well as set the framework for burden sharing agreements.

2.         Develop multilateral opportunities to enhance disaster response.

At the international level, the Navy could lead the effort to build an increasingly complex set of Search and Rescue and Emergency Response training exercises that include multiple U.S. agencies as well as those from other Arctic Nations.

The aforementioned efforts would ultimately lead to the development of an International Arctic Management Center.  This center, with operational nodes near the Bering Strait and Iceland-UK Gap, would be multinational and interagency in nature.  The primary roles of this center would be to manage safe shipping transit throughout the Arctic and coordinate multinational emergency response efforts.  Management of shipping would include organization of convoys as well as activation and dynamic adjustment of approved shipping corridors based on traffic density, weather, and ice.

Proactive international management of commercial activities in the Arctic will greatly reduce the risk of catastrophic events and improve response to those that occur.  Additionally, coordination efforts stand to strengthen cooperation and relations across all Arctic and participant nations, including Russia.

 

Ryan Leary is a U.S. naval officer and Federal Executive Fellow at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.  His opinions and views expressed in this post are his alone and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not necessarily represent the views of U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Navy, or any command.

Future Tech

Sub-Par: Designing a Better (and Cheaper) SEAL Delivery System

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U.S. Navy Special Warfare operators hold a unique role in the Special Operations community: conducting missions covertly, from the sea, and back out again, without notice. And with America’s land wars winding down, Navy SEALs can once again focus on littoral operations in hostile and dangerous locales. To aid in this end, Northrop Grumman’s Electric Boat division is developing a new submersible to insert SEALs quickly and quietly, all while staying dry and ready for the mission ahead.

If this sounds like a familiar concept, that’s because it’s been done before. Recognizing the need for a dry submersible superior to the current SEAL Delivery Vehicle (SDV), the U.S. Government and Northrop Grumman developed the Advanced SEAL Delivery System (ASDS) in the late 90’s. However, in true government fashion, poor design and massive cost overruns doomed the program, which ended fittingly with a fire onboard the only ASDS in 2008. The new incarnation hopes to avoid previous pitfalls and help to usher in a new era of cheaper, commercially developed craft for future U.S. Navy operations.

The Special Warfare community voiced concern regarding wet-submersible insertion (i.e., SEAL Delivery Vehicle) in the early 1980s. Exposed to extreme sea and air temperatures during SDV or free swim insertion, teams wasted precious time refocusing and recovering once landing ashore. As a result, U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and Northrop Grumman teamed up to develop a dry mini-sub which could be launched from submarines, allowing team members to conserve energy, stay dry, and maintain 100% physical readiness upon hitting the beach to execute tasking. The Navy ordered six ASDSs, with the first becoming operational in 2003.

Too good to be true? You bet. In the same vein as current projects, the ASDS suffered from poor design, ranging from noisy propellers to weak lithium batteries. Repairs and redesign of ASDS-1 ballooned the budget from a total cost of $527 million to almost $2 billion, effectively cancelling the program. ASDS-1 continued in service before catching fire in November 2008, causing SOCOM to permanently jettison the program shortly thereafter.

As involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan winds down, SEALs will find themselves focused once again on the maritime and littoral environments. Electric Boat and SOCOM have joined forces to develop a new dry submersible, known as of now as User Operational Evaluation System (UOES) 3. Still in the planning stages, UOES 3 will be in the testing stages through 2015, most likely entering service shortly after. With the failure of ASDS undoubtedly fresh on the minds of researchers, these shortcomings should play a large role in the design of UOES 3.

The Navy is keen on tightening its belt in these frugal financial times, and finding detours around expensive new projects is a great way to save a buck. Electric Boat is planning just that – even partnering with a civilian firm, using commercial concepts to keep costs low. Along with UOES 3, the Navy’s newest Special Operations transport and Mobile Landing Platform are also joint military-civilian ventures, and it may only be a matter of time until UOES 3 is launched from one of these vessels.

Naval Special Warfare needs a dry submersible to keep operators safe and focused on the mission at hand. ASDS was doomed by poor engineering and skyrocketing repair costs; hopefully the fusion of civilian and military engineers can provide the vessel required by operators at a price required by American taxpayers.

LTJG Brett Davis is a U.S. Navy Surface Warfare Officer, runs the blog ClearedHot, and is trying to figure out how Twitter actually works.  He holds an M.A. in International Relations from Northeastern University and these views are entirely his own.

History

Google Ngram Viewer’s History of the Cold War

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It turns out that the history of the Cold War is best told not in books, but in graphs about books.

Google has an obscure new feature called “Ngram Viewer,” which allows users to search for individual words, or “grams,” as they appear in over 5.2 million digitalized books stored in the Google database. Users have the option to search for words in more than a dozen languages, even discriminating between British and American English.

The search function also allows users to modify particular words to do things such as determine when certain forms of words fell into and out of popularity (such as when “tackle” was used as a noun instead of a verb). By adding wildcards or modifiers, users can search for things as diverse as the popularity of slacks versus dress pants to which Internet operating system was most prominent.

Ngram Viewer searches from books written from over 600 years ago to the present day. The x-axis represents years in chronological order; the y-axis represents the percentage of books that a particular word or phrase appears in during that given year.

In a search of books between 1840 and 2008 in the English language, entering the terms “communism” and “capitalism” reveals a telling graph. At first glance, these data plots appear to create two insignificant lines. But combined with our knowledge of 21st century events, it becomes a surprisingly accurate graphical depiction of one of the defining struggles of modern times.Ngram

Communism first appears to overtake capitalism in 1947, where the red and blue lines intersect. This point coincides precisely with the announcement of the Truman Doctrine, signaling the beginning of the “containment” strategy that would consume much of the next four decades.

Communism appears to reach its apex on the graph in 1963 during the Kennedy administration, just two years after construction began on the Berlin Wall. Also of significance during this time was the introduction of a hotline between Moscow and Washington, enabling direct communication between the two Cold War powers for the first time. After the president’s assassination, communism begins a fatal free-fall from which it will never recover. In 1964, Leonid Brezhnev succeeds Nikita Khrushchev as Chairman of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Capitalism finally appears to regain the upper hand against communism in 1971, around the time of the death of Khrushchev. Significant during this time is President Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, the first time an American president had visited the communist nation.

Finally, in the early 1990s, the area between the two curves is the greatest, signaling the vanquishing of the Soviet Union. After the Malta Summit between Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev and President George HW Bush in December 1989, perhaps the most symbolic sign of the fall of the Soviet Union was the opening of a McDonald’s in the heart of Moscow on January 31, 1990.

While compiling a graph of words found in books of a particular language and attempting to ascribe some geopolitical significance to them may constitute a form of lingual bias, the uncanny similarity between the types of books written during the Cold War and the actual events therein is remarkable. Google’s Ngram Viewer is an important tool for analyzing society and discovering who we really are as a people.

Can one book predict the fate of the world? Perhaps not. But can millions of authors from around the world over the course of dozens of years accurately portray the consciousness of a people? Deus ex machina.

Europe, Global Analysis

The Albanian Navy in Action

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The Republic of Albania, which joined NATO together with Croatia in 2009, has had an interesting relationship with its own maritime forces over the past two decades. Until the onset of economic crisis in 1996, the Albanian Naval Force consisted of approximately 145 vessels, many of which were obtained from China or the Soviet Union for the sole purpose of coastal defence. Illustrative of this focus on countering outside aggression, 45 of the Albanian Naval Force’s vessels were Huchuan-class torpedo boats manufactured in China.

With the onset of economic crisis in 1996, much of Albania’s maritime forces were decommissioned. Even prior to the collapse of the country’s communist regime in 1990-1991, the navy had entered a state of decline. The pride of the fleet – four Whiskey-class submarines obtained from Soviet benefactors – had essentially been mothballed by the end of the 1980s. Albania, despite its commanding position at the point where the Ionian Sea meets the Adriatic, had become a non-factor in naval affairs.

But the Albanian Naval Force has begun to experience a profound resurgence in recent years. Even prior to the country’s NATO accession, Albania committed in 2007 to participate in Operation Active Endeavour. This maritime operation is responsible for monitoring traffic in the Mediterranean Sea, intercepting illicit arms or narcotics shipments and enhancing the security of legitimate shipping in general. Since joining NATO, Albania has ramped up the modernization and expansion of its maritime forces as well. Whereas the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania once deployed sleek torpedo boats and predatory Soviet submarines in its defence, the Republic of Albania is actively acquiring patrol vessels to police Albanian waters and combat organized crime groups.

The mainstay of the new Albanian Naval Force is the Damen Stan 4207 patrol vessel, designed in the Netherlands but built for the most part in Albania. As of 2013, four vessels of this class are now in service on Albania’s coasts. It is worth noting that this design was the inspiration for the Canadian Coast Guard’s own Hero-class mid-shore patrol vessel, and that 35 vessels of the Damen Stan 4207 design are currently operated by 13 countries. The Albanian Naval Force backs up these four quality patrol vessels with an additional 27 vessels of various classes, most of which are patrol boats obtained from either the United States or the Italian Coast Guard.

But why is Albania dedicating so much of its resources toward the development of its maritime forces? The total cost of procuring the four Damen Stan 4207 patrol vessels is estimated to have been $45 million alone. The reason for this significant investment may be South Eastern Europe’s growing role as both a source of, and a transit point in, the trade of illicit narcotics. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Albania has emerged as the fourth most common country of provenance for heroin, behind only Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Tajikistan. Lazarat, located in the far south of Albania, has emerged as one of Europe’s most significant centres for cannabis cultivation and the production of such cannabis-related products as hashish. Another UNODC report estimates that Albania itself is home to only 3,000 to 5,000 injection drug users, indicating that heroin entering Albania is hardly meant to remain there. Rather, the 2012-2015 UNODC Regional Programme for South Eastern Europe pegs the market value of heroin trafficked from this region to Western Europe at approximately $13 billion a year.

While some quantity of cocaine, heroin, and cannabis may take a circuitous route by land through Albania, Montenegro, and other South Eastern European countries until it reaches the territory of European Union member states, Albania’s geographic position opens up other options. The Albanian city of Vlorë is less than 100 kilometres from the Italian port of Otranto, separated only by the narrow strait that lies between the Ionian and the Adriatic proper. There are likely other sea routes which can be employed by organized crime. The Albanian Naval Force of the past would have not been well-disposed toward the interception of criminal elements transporting narcotics between these ports and others. But new patrol vessels have enhanced Albania’s capacity to address this security challenge and, with the enhanced cooperation NATO membership brings, Albania is better able to coordinate patrols and interdictions with its Italian partners.

The substantial increase in drug seizures along Albania’s coasts since 2006 is a positive sign. There is still some room for improvement in the area of inter-agency cooperation, however. On the eve of its NATO accession, Albania established an Inter-institutional Maritime Operations Centre (IMOC), intended to foster close cooperation between the Defence and Interior Ministries (as well as military and law enforcement personnel by extension). As noted in a recent review of Albania’s National Security Strategy though, IMOC has thus far been constrained by overlapping legislation and bureaucratic friction. Reforming the Albanian Maritime Code and other relevant aspects of the country’s legal framework may be necessary to ensure the efficiency and efficacy of Albania’s maritime operations.

Fortunately, the momentum is with the Albanian Naval Force in the struggle against regional narcotics trafficking. Continued support from NATO and its member states will further discourage organized crime, ending the exploitation of this proud country as a transit point for harmful drugs.

This article was originally published by the NATO Council of Canada.

Paul Pryce is a Junior Research Fellow at the Atlantic Council of Canada. With degrees in political science from universities in both Canada and Estonia, he has previously worked in conflict resolution as a Research Fellow with the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly. His research interests include African security issues and NATO-Russia relations.