Build the Infrastructure and the Arctic Will Follow

In the summer of 1955, the Arctic was one of the busiest construction zones on Earth. 

Ships pushed north through ice-laden waters carrying radar towers, fuel tanks, generators, and prefabricated buildings. They had only a few weeks to unload before winter returned.

When the ships reached the Arctic coast, workers offloaded cargo directly onto beaches and rough gravel airstrips. From there, tractor convoys hauled materials across tundra and ice to remote sites hundreds of miles apart.

Within two years the result went operational: the Distant Early Warning Line (DEW), a radar chain stretching nearly 3,000 miles from Alaska to Greenland. Sixty-three stations formed a northern barrier designed to detect Soviet bombers approaching North America across the pole.

The project involved roughly 25,000 workers and cost about $297 million in 1950s dollars—more than $3 billion today. 

Cold War planners didn’t spend years debating Arctic strategy. They built infrastructure. 

This is a lesson we continue to learn. 

I have spent the past several years working in and around the Arctic. That includes multiple iterations of Operation Nanook in Canada, exercises such as Arctic Edge, travel across Alaska’s High North, and time spent with the Finnish Navy aboard both an icebreaker and a mine layer in 2018.

I have also had the opportunity to visit places like Resolute Bay and Cambridge Bay, communities that sit at the edge of North America’s northern approaches. 

Those experiences reinforced something simple that anyone who operates in the Arctic quickly learns: The biggest challenge isn’t strategy… It’s infrastructure. 

Distance dominates everything. Airfields are sparse. Fuel storage is limited. Ports capable of supporting large vessels are few and far between. 

During several recent deployments in the North Pacific and Arctic approaches near Alaska, the Navy’s ability to remain forward wasn’t entirely constrained by the mission or the weather. It was typically left to time on station based fuel and proximity to nearby logistics hubs.

The routine diesel top-offs ultimately came at the cost of commercial fishing MGO surplus. 

Thus, our fleet pulls back to Dutch Harbor, or farther Northward towards Anchorage, resulting in days off station for resupply. 

That’s the Arctic in a nutshell. Our ability to operate in the High North requires infrastructure. 

During the Cold War, the United States and Canada treated the Arctic as a theater of operations. Yes, with austerity and extreme operating environments, but not an abstract concept amongst policy makers who have never actually operated in the Arctic. 

The DEW Line was only one piece of that puzzle. Communications systems such as the White Alice network linked remote radar stations across Alaska. Airfields and logistics hubs appeared across the north. Fort Greely eventually became home to part of the United States’ ballistic missile defense system.

Today it hosts 40 of the country’s 44 ground-based interceptors, positioned there because missiles approaching North America from Eurasia travel across polar trajectories. 

Further west, along the Aleutian chain, Naval Air Station Adak became one of the most strategically important outposts of the Cold War. Located roughly 450 miles from Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, the base supported anti-submarine aircraft, surveillance systems, and logistics operations across the North Pacific. 

At its peak, more than 6,000 personnel were stationed in Adak, along with the thousands of Norwegian caribou left over from World War II’s Nordic initiative to help feed troops stationed throughout the islands. 

Adak closed in 1997. The caribou are still there and the climate remains extreme. 

Today, the Arctic is again drawing attention. 

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Russia has reopened or constructed more than 50 military facilities across its Arctic territory since 2014, part of a broader effort to secure the Northern Sea Route and reinforce its northern flank. 

China, meanwhile, has declared itself a “near-Arctic state” and is investing heavily in polar research, icebreakers, and Arctic shipping routes as part of its Polar Silk Road initiative. 

At the same time, the physical Arctic is changing. Satellite observations show summer sea ice has declined roughly 40 percent since 1979, opening seasonal maritime routes that were once inaccessible. 

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that about 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil and 30 percent of its undiscovered natural gas lie north of the Arctic Circle. 

Interest in the region is rising for good reason. 

But much of the Western response still happens in conference halls. 

Over the past decade, Arctic conferences, research initiatives, and policy forums have multiplied. There is no shortage of discussion about the future of the region. Anyone who works in Arctic policy can fill a calendar with events discussing security, governance, climate, or economic development. 

Those conversations are useful. They help connect policymakers, researchers, and operators across Arctic nations. But dialogue has expanded faster than the capacity to build infrastructure. 

Exercises such as Operation Nanook, which brings together forces from Canada, the United States, and European partners each year, demonstrate growing interest in operating in the High North. Yet these operations remain episodic. Forces deploy north for a few weeks, train, and return south again. 

The limiting factor for stay-time is always logistics. 

Alaska sits at the center of this problem—and the solution. The state has more than 6,600 miles of coastline, longer than the rest of the United States combined. It sits midcourse for the maritime routes connecting the Pacific and Arctic Oceans as well as the direct, great circle route from the US West Coast to the South China Sea. 

Yet beyond a handful of large interior installations, infrastructure across western and northern Alaska remains limited. 

This is why places like Adak matter. 

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Adak already has the runways, the port, and the location. What it lacks are relatively modest upgrades: fuel storage, logistics support, and maintenance capability that would allow ships and aircraft to remain forward longer. 

The important point is that these investments do not need to be purely military. Ports, communications networks, airfields, and fuel depots support commercial shipping, fisheries, and local communities just as much as military operations. In the Arctic, infrastructure is almost always dual use. 

Build the infrastructure and both civilian and military users will come. 

There is precedent for this approach across the Arctic. 

Canada, for example, relies heavily on the Canadian Rangers, a force of roughly 5,000 reservists drawn largely from Indigenous communities, to maintain presence across remote northern regions. Their patrols provide local knowledge and situational awareness that satellites alone cannot provide. 

Even relatively modest infrastructure investments can reshape northern regions. The all-season road connecting Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk in Canada’s Northwest Territories, completed in 2017 after decades of debate, has already improved transportation access and economic activity in the region. 

Infrastructure changes what is possible in the North. 

The United States does not need to recreate the massive Cold War basing network across the Arctic. 

But it does need to remember why that network existed in the first place. 

Those realities have not changed since the summer of 1955, when workers raced the Arctic winter to build a radar line across the top of the world. 

The lesson from that effort still applies. The motivation and momentum present in 1955 is what we need today. For a sustained presence in the Arctic, we must start where Cold War planners started. Concrete and steel. 

Build the infrastructure first.

Grant Bryan Is an Arctic Maritime Strategist and freelance writer on Naval Operations and National Security. The opinions expressed in this piece are his own and do not reflect the policies or strategies of the U.S. Department of War.