And as they enter the Northwest Passage, less than 5 percent of these waters are charted to modern-day standards. They have not been surveyed. And even if they have been surveyed in the last 50 or 60 years, there’s a lot of seismic activity up there, so we don’t know what may have happened since that last survey – and this isn’t because of negligence on the part of the scientific community or the surveyors. It’s because these are waters that have been historically covered with ice, so there was no access. Now the ice has retreated; there is access; and we’re seeing this surge in human activity. Last year it was oil and gas exploration. This year it’s the cruise ship industry. I believe Crystal Serenity has already booked a cruise for next year, and there are discussions of maybe even a second cruise in addition to that as well.

The new Arctic Coast Guard Forum had a meeting in June. Are there plans to conduct exercises like this with other members?

Canada is participating in this exercise – they’ll actually set up an encampment. We’re also working with Northern Command on a logistics piece: How do we at least provide temporary shelter for 250 survivors? Norway is sending an observation team. And as of now, the Russian Federation is planning to send a team of observers, all from the Arctic Coast Guard Forum. The thinking is that next year, through the Arctic Coast Guard Forum platform, we’ll do a combined search and rescue exercise, perhaps in the Atlantic, where we’re seeing even more human activity among members of the EU [European Union] nations over there.

So what happened at that Arctic Coast Guard Forum meeting in Boston, Massachusetts, and what are the next steps for the organization?

It was a historic occasion. We signed our general statement in Faneuil Hall. And this framework establishes our close working relationships with the other coast guards in the region. The U.S. and Canada coast guards have a long-standing transparent relationship, but we haven’t had those enduring relationships with other members of the Arctic Council, under the auspices of the Arctic Coast Guard Forum.

One of the most important things we established in Boston was better information-sharing, something as fundamental as where your ships are operating. If you have a distress call in the high latitudes, it might be another member of the Arctic Coast Guard Forum that has a vessel in the nearest proximity. I could pick up the phone and talk to my counterpart, and they could do so likewise. The most imminent threats in these high latitudes are safety of life at sea and the environment. If you have a ship that runs aground, you’ve got a mass rescue, but now you also have a major oil spill in a very pristine environment that affects an indigenous population who subsists on the natural resources, the mammals, and the fish that live up there, as well.

Those are some of the areas we are going to immediately focus on with a few exercises. If you follow the news, you understand the United States has a complicated and delicate relationship with Russia. But in a mass rescue exercise, i think we put our sovereign interests aside when it comes to events like that. It’s a great platform for maturing this Arctic Coast Guard Forum, so we’re going to start there and work outwards.

During the ice-free season these national security cutters can operate in that environment. Connectivity, command, and control are a challenge when you get up in these high latitudes, as you look at bandwidth communications and our existing satellite coverage. It’s very limited up there, especially once you get much north of about 72 degrees. If you need to move large bandwidths of information, imagery, and the like, it’s a challenge. And it’s a national challenge; it’s not just a Coast Guard challenge. It’s another area where we need to look at the whole of government: How do we reconstitute our satellite constellation to provide that broadband communications in the high latitudes? We have the surface assets that can certainly leverage that.

There is another component of this, and that is maritime security. The Arctic Council does not address maritime security – but the Arctic Coast Guard Forum can. In building these trusting relationships, it’s much easier to use humanitarian assistance as a building block going forward.

You’ve mentioned that because of the difficulty in establishing a shoreside presence in the Arctic, the Coast Guard will rely on the heavy icebreaker as a kind of “floating headquarters” for operations in the foreseeable future. The national security cutters are designed to function in this way, and the command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) program has been critical in providing that capability. Are there any C4ISR issues that are particular to the Arctic?

Coincidentally, the Coast Guard Cutter Stratton [was] the surface action group commander during the Rim of the Pacific [RIMPAC] exercise that just completed, the annual RIMPAC exercise. And within their surface action group was the Chinese navy, the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] Navy. Stratton just completed that mission, and today they went from the 50th state, Hawaii, to the 49th state, Alaska, where they are now providing arctic domain awareness in that area. Same deployment, but a completely different mission set.