As our current geopolitical landscape continues to change rapidly more interest is being focused on our North pole as countries attempt to expand their arctic presence. Just recently the Department of Defense came out with its updated 2024 Arctic Strategy which give the United State’s point of view of the fluctuating environment. Similar to the presentation that I made concerning Antarctica and the limited nature of satellite communications on the continent, the arctic area has the same lack of infrastructure that limits military capabilities. Without good communication systems present at our high latitudes we risk communication delays, blackouts, low data rates, and loss of general domain awareness due to the lack of information.
The Space Force operates multiple high latitude bases such as Clear Space Force Station in Alaska and Pituffik Space Base on the northern coast of Greenland. These bases host radar and satellite communications systems that our integral to our nations missile warning system and if the satellites that supported these stations were ever compromised a link in the defensive chain would be broken potentially opening the possibility of an attack making it through unnoticed.
The Arctic Strategy document goes on to discuss the need for a robust satellite communication network to be able to support data from over 250 deployed advanced multi-role aircraft by the 2030’s. This would take a significant amount of satellite infrastructure to accomplish at these high latitudes and signals a larger focus on getting as much real-time data in and out of the Arctic as fast as possible if a situation where it was needed ever arose.
Climate change is also a large focus of the DoD’s 2024 Arctic strategy. It describes that since the Arctic is warming over three times faster than the rest of the world the natural environment changes are affecting infrastructure that was built during the Cold War. These changes could even impact supply chain routes in the Arctic Ocean since they expect less and less ice to be forming each year. They predict that it is even possible that the Arctic Ocean could have its first ice free summer by 2030. This relates to space systems in that our northern ground stations are part of this critical infrastructure that is going to be and is impacted by climate change and if resources are not dedicated to prevent the degradation and damage of these site than it could impact their communication abilities.