Military Review English Edition November-December 2014 | Page 62

operations. Military researchers David A. Hoffman
and Greg Netardus also underscore this point:
One of the greatest detrimental factors [in]
the U.S. Army [in regard to] Cold Weather
Mountain operations is [the Army’s] … need
to constantly rotate personnel. There are very
few soldiers who have the requisite skills to
move into [an Arctic] unit and be proficient,
either as a leader or as a unit member. These
skills take years to refine and become a cohesive operational entity.23
In short, merely possessing the equipment and
logistics required to fight in the Arctic is not sufficient
for success—a unit must understand how to overcome
the challenges and use its resources to project combat
power. This can only be done by constantly training in
the Arctic environment.
Apart from the support and personnel issues, one
of the U.S. Army’s major shortfalls with employing its
limited Arctic resources is a lack of formal maneuver
and sustainment tactics. Current doctrine, built upon
experiences in relatively temperate environments,
fails to address the changes that a force must make
in its maneuver tactics to fight and win in an Arctic
environment.
Arctic tacticians and practitioners repeatedly stress
two main tenants of warfare that conflict with current
trends in our brigade-sized, offense-heavy warfare:
first, that the upper hand in an Arctic fight goes to the
defender, and second, that the most lethal unit is the
mobile small unit.24 In the event of an Arctic conflict,
it is likely that the need for extensive logistic lines
and the difficulty in maneuvering non-Arctic combat
vehicles or large dismounted formations will force
opposing armies into mobile defensive lines and tactics
resembling Lt. Erwin Rommel’s mountain maneuvers
in the 12th Battle of Isonzo during World War I.25 The
defender who can sustain its force against the enemy
and the elements while simultaneously making slow,
creeping progress towards its goal will win the day
against an enemy who moves quickly but outruns its
supply lines and leaves its soldiers at the mercy of the
environment.
In developing Arctic maneuver and sustainment
tactics, the U.S. Army and joint ground warfighting
community will invariably need to augment its very
few ski- and mountain-trained troops because, as Col.
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Walter Downing observed in his 1954 study on future
Arctic warfare, the diverse landscape of “[ice] barrens,
… muskeg, rugged mountains, and almost impassible
scrub forests” will require forces to traverse snow, ice,
rock, and swamp to reach their objectives.26 To illustrate, during Guerrier Nordique 2014, a team landing
on Frobisher’s Farthest Island arrived at the beginning
of the tidal fall. While the first team walked onto the
island, subsequent teams to arrive faced the emergence
of an ice cliff exposed by the falling tide, which required
the use of basic mountaineering tasks to bypass the
obstacle.
In addition to these terrain challenges, consider the
effects of degraded communications due to ionospheric
blackouts; inaccuracy of traditional compasses; and the
difficulty in using the limited cover and concealment to
hide a bullet’s ice fog trails, vehicle exhaust plumes, and
thermal indicators. One begins to see that Arctic maneuver doctrine will encompass a significantly different way of conducting small-unit warfare to maintain
combat superiority.
At the root of the current lack of progress toward
a unified joint Arctic and mountain operational requirement is the failure to unify efforts among the few
elements scattered among several key organizations
in the U.S. military that do practice these increasingly
critical skills. In violation of a key doctrinal tenant
specified in Joint Publication 1, Joint Doctrine for the
Armed Forces of the United States, there is a decided
lack of unity of effort within joint ground warfighting
units toward establishing the tactical and operational capacity to fulfill the tenets of the DOD’s Arctic
Strategy. This begins with the failure to establish “a
common philosophy, a common language, a common purpose” in the form of universal joint task list
tasks that address Arctic and mountain operational
requirements.27
The Northern Warfare Training Center in Alaska,
the Mountain Warfare School and the associated
86th Infantry Brigade Combat Team (Mountain)
in Vermont, U.S. Army-Alaska, the Marine Corps
Mountain Warfare Center, and various elements of
special operations forces all maintain independent
small cadres of personnel with the requisite skill base
for operating in Arctic environments. However, the
distance and lack of a formal requirement to operate
together results in an ad hoc and informal networking
November-December 2014  MILITARY REVIEW