NATO warships return to the frozen Barents Sea for the first time in a generation
LA MER DE BARENTS is not a welcoming place for visitors. “Frequent snowstorms … wiped out the country for hours,” wrote an unlucky British submariner sent there to snoop during the Cold War. “We were confronted with the bestiality of the spray that turned into ice before they even hit our faces. It is therefore not surprising that American warships have been kept clear of the sea since the mid-1980s – until their return last week.
Their presence is part of a constant northward creep of the NATO naval forces. In 2018, the alliance, joined by Sweden and Finland, organized Trident Juncture, its largest exercise since the end of the Cold War, in Norway. This involved the first deployment of an American aircraft carrier in the Arctic Circle in three decades. Western warships have been frequent visitors ever since. On May 1, a “surface action group” of two American destroyers, a nuclear submarine, a support ship and long-range maritime patrol aircraft, as well as a British frigate, exercised their skills in subhunter in the Norwegian Sea.
Such exercises are not unusual. But on May 4, some of these ships broke away and sailed further north in the Barents Sea, with a third destroyer. Although American and British submarines routinely roam the area, to covertly spy on Russian installations and exercises, surface ships have not done so for a generation. On May 7, the Russian Navy welcomed unwanted visitors and announced that it would also conduct exercises in the Barents Sea – in reality, live fire. On 8 May, after celebrating VE Day in the backyard of Russia and completing several days of “high end sustained operations”, the NATO ships left.
It is an important decision. The deployment of destroyers carrying missile defense systems and land attack cruise missiles is particularly assertive. After all, the region is the heart of Russian naval power, including the country’s submarine nuclear weapons. Russia’s northern fleet is based in Severomorsk on the Kola Peninsula, east of the highest fringes of Norway.
Western navies are anxious to show that covid-19 did not dull their swords, at a time when America and France each lost an aircraft carrier due to the virus. But their interest in the Far North predates the pandemic. One of the objectives of the Barents Sea incursion was “to assert freedom of navigation,” said the United States Navy. Russia has imposed rules on ships wishing to transit the North Sea Route (NSR), an arctic passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific that is becoming more and more navigable as global warming melts the ice caps ( see map). America mocks these demands, insisting that foreign warships have the right to innocently cross territorial waters under the law of the sea. Although last week’s exercise did not penetrate in the NSR, he might suggest that he is willing to do so in the future.
In addition, the Arctic is a growing factor in NATO’s defense policy. Russia has strengthened its northern fleet in recent years, adding air defense systems, missile depots and new ships. Russian submarines remain “outnumbered” by American submarines, says Michael Kofman of the Center for Naval Analyzes. But they are more and more busy. Russian submarine activity is at its highest level since the Cold War, according to NATO commanders. Ten submarines are said to have burst into the North Atlantic in October to see if they could escape detection.
“The Russian Navy is much more active today than it was in the 1990s and 2000s, but this return was inevitable given the lack of activity and funding at that time,” said Kofman. However, this buildup worries NATO planners. The new Russian submarines are silent and well armed. As a result, the alliance’s “acoustic edge” – its ability to detect submarines at longer ranges than Russia – “has shrunk considerably,” notes a recent article by Nick Childs of the International Institute. for Strategic Studies (IISS), a think tank in London.
Russia mainly uses its attack submarines to defend a “bastion”, the area of the Barents Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk where its own nuclear ballistic missile submarines patrol. But some NATO admirals fear that, in a conflict, some may pose a broader threat to the alliance. A separate Russian naval force known as the Main Directorate for Research on the High Seas (GUGI, in its Russian acronym) could also target the thicket of cables crossing the Atlantic.
The challenge is familiar. During much of the Cold War, NATO allies sought to bottle the Soviet fleet in the Arctic by setting up a stake through the so-called GIUK hole, a transit route between Greenland, l ‘Iceland and Great Britain which was stretched underwater listening posts. “We will pass all the imperialist sonar nets, and we do not be detected! “said Captain Ramius, commander of the Red october, the eponymous Soviet submarine from Tom Clancy’s first novel in 1984.
The gap is now back in fashion and NATO is reinvesting in anti-submarine capabilities after decades of neglect. America has stepped up flights of P8 fighter jets from Iceland, and Britain and Norway are establishing their own P8 squadrons. The aim is to follow and keep the Russian nuclear submarines in danger as soon as possible, as even one in the Atlantic could cause problems across a wide ocean strip.
But a defensive perimeter may not be enough. A new generation of missiles based on Russian ships could strike at NATO ships or territories far north of the GIUK gap, perhaps even from home security. “This technological development represents a dramatically new and difficult threat to NATO forces,” concludes the IISS. Similar concerns led the Reagan administration to adopt a more offensive naval stance, sending forces over the sidelines and into the maritime stronghold of the Soviet Union. “I am struck by similarities with the 1980s,” said Niklas Granholm of the Swedish Defense Research Agency, referring to the Anglo-American presence in the Barents Sea. “An advanced maritime strategy to get closer to the fleet of northern Russia, rather than meet it further south.”