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NATO militaries and startups aim to tackle the unique challenges of fighting in the Arctic, as the risk of conflict there increases

Sending drones and robots into battle, rather than humans, has become a tenet of modern warfare. Nowhere does that make more sense than in the frozen expanses of the Arctic.

But the closer you get to the North Pole, the less useful cutting-edge technology becomes. Magnetic storms distort satellite signals; frigid temperatures drain batteries or freeze equipment in minutes; navigation systems lack reference points on snowfields.

During a seven-nation polar exercise in Canada earlier this year to test equipment worth millions of dollars, the U.S. military’s all-terrain arctic vehicles broke down after 30 minutes because hydraulic fluids congealed in the cold.

Swedish soldiers participating in the exercise were handed $20,000 night-vision optics that broke because the aluminum in the goggles couldn’t handle the minus 40 degree Fahrenheit conditions.

“The Arctic is the ultimate adversary,” said Eric Slesinger, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who now runs a venture-capital firm bankrolling defense startups, including some trying to master arctic fighting.

In Ukraine, armed forces use off-the-shelf gear, from power sources and communications tools to chemicals and lubricants. In the Arctic, using such basics often requires thorough re-engineering.

Great-power competition is growing in the High North as climate change opens sea lanes and access to natural resources. Russia is militarily dominant there, with nuclear-submarine forces, missile bases, airfields and ports on the Kola Peninsula. The shortest flight path to North America for Russia’s next-generation hypersonic cruise missiles is over the North Pole.

Of the eight countries with Arctic territory, only Russia isn’t in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Among NATO members, the U.S. and Canada’s main worry is Russian missiles, while Finland and Norway’s borders with Russia make a land incursion a more pressing concern there.

An arctic conflict would force war planners back to basics. Extreme cold makes the most common components brittle. Low temperatures alter the physical properties of rubber, causing seals to lose their elasticity and leak. Traces of water or humidity freeze into ice crystals that can scratch pumps and create blockages. Wires should be insulated with silicone rather than PVC, which can crack.

Oil and other lubricants thicken and congeal. In most standard hydraulic systems, fluid becomes syrupy and can affect everything from aircraft controls to missile launchers and radar masts. A single freeze-up can knock out an entire weapons platform or immobilize a convoy.

One of the Arctic’s great tourist attractions is, for military planners, one of its great irritants: the northern lights.

Aurora Borealis, as the green lights dancing across the sky are known formally, are caused by charged sun particles interacting with the Earth’s magnetic field, which is most intense at the poles. They interfere with radio communications and satellite-navigation systems that provide positioning and timing data.

One lesson that does apply from the war in Ukraine is the critical role that private startups can play in driving innovation in collaboration with governments.

Two British explorers earlier this year launched Arctic Research and Development, a startup aimed at putting autonomous systems into the polar regions. Ben Saunders and Frederick Fennessy, who have traveled roughly 7,500 miles on skis in the Arctic between them, compare designing High North technology to building a miniature space program. Their employees have backgrounds in space research, intelligence, climate science and the military. Slesinger, the venture capitalist, is an early investor.

They develop software specifically for use in the Arctic, along with virtual maps that portray the region more accurately than widely used Mercator projections, which distort polar distances. They test gear in a large freezer in an industrial unit in rural England, where they can expose equipment to minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit.

“How come we have had a Perseverance Rover on Mars for years, happily sending data back, and we haven’t had an autonomous rover in the Arctic?” said Saunders. “For so much of human history it was ‘Here be dragons,’ blankish map territory.”

One of the company’s products under development is an orange box shaped like a suitcase called Icelink, a high-bandwidth communications hub weighing less than 40 pounds, which also contains GPS antennas and specialized batteries that last for days.

Saunders knows the importance of stress-testing even the smallest bits. Once, on a solo trip to the North Pole, he snapped a piece of his ski binding and was forced to abort the entire expedition, writing off a trip that cost more than $200,000.

Arctic weather itself means that a war there would look different from anywhere else. Ukrainian drone manufacturers have been churning out hundreds of thousands of inexpensive, agile quadcopters that rely on digital communications to find targets. They would fail in the Arctic, where drones must be equipped with deicing systems, robust propulsion to deal with strong winds, and run on jet fuel or diesel instead of batteries. They are usually so large they need a trailer or runway to launch.

Powering radios alone is a logistical nightmare. The Swedish military was recently approached by a private company offering a charger for their batteries to be carried by sled. Weighing over 400 pounds, it would have gotten stuck at the first sight of powdered snow.

“The problem right now is that many in the industry have no idea what the guys on the ground need,” and their ideas are theoretically feasible but impractical, said Frederik Flink, commander of the international training wing at the Subarctic Warfare Center in Northern Sweden. “We on the ground also have an idea of what we want,” he said, but added their ideas are “probably not technically realistic.”

For the last three winters, the Subarctic Warfare Center has been giving feedback to a U.S. company developing a new type of cross-country ski with bindings that don’t break under the pressure of a soldier working in the field.

AI is also of limited use in the Arctic. In Ukraine, it is used to speed up decision-making by processing vast amounts of data. The country’s east is heavily urbanized, with a population density about 50 times that of Arctic Scandinavia and Finland, where every square mile houses on average five people. It is home to extensive road networks and railroads, energy production and heavy industry. If the Arctic becomes a battleground, a lack of such things means AI would have less data to work with.

Man-made interference also hits harder in the Arctic. In the High North, satellites orbiting the equator can often be obscured by the curvature of the Earth, meaning fewer visible satellites than elsewhere on the planet. That means jamming, a nuisance elsewhere, becomes a serious safety concern.

In 2019, Norway’s communications authority Nkom registered six GPS failures in Eastern Finnmark, in the country’s north bordering Russia. In 2022, the year Russia invaded Ukraine, it recorded 122. Since late 2024, jamming has become so frequent that the regulator has stopped counting.

“You need to accept that this is the situation, and find solutions,” said Espen Slette, head of the department for spectrum management at Nkom.

To that end, representatives from more than 100 companies assembled on the Norwegian island of Andøya in September for Jammertest. The annual event sees tech geeks test gear, including drones, atomic clocks antennas and chips, against jamming in the harsh Arctic climate.

Heidi Andreassen, partner and founder of Testnor, which organizes Jammertest, said she believed the jamming isn’t an act of Russian aggression, but a spillover effect of Moscow’s efforts to protect its military assets on the nearby Kola Peninsula from drones.

“In the Arctic, if you have very challenging weather conditions and no line of sight, then jamming can be critical,” Andreassen said. “Just a few years ago, this was not something people cared about because it was rare. But now, it has become a daily problem.”