Inside the West’s race to defend the Arctic

Down in the ship’s hold was construction material needed to upgrade the northernmost military outpost, a Canadian spy station providing crucial intelligence on Russia’s military.

After nine days traversing 2,500 nautical miles, pitching on swells from Hurricane Erin, the Canadian-flagged Nunalik had reached its destination—30 minutes late. It was Friday, and dockworkers in the port of the U.S.’s Pituffik Space Base had already gone home for the August weekend. The delivery would have to wait.

“I’d have thought they would have taken us in and welcomed us after a long journey," said 66-year-old Canadian Gibson, who has sailed since he was 18.

The West is racing to catch up with Russian and Chinese expansion in the Arctic, one of the world’s most contested places, in a new era of geopolitical conflict. It is also working out its priorities.

Defending the Arctic—an environment that for centuries has thwarted ambitions of explorers and governments—will demand big budgets, unprecedented resources and determination. Even the most basic elements of operating a military base in the high Arctic are extremely cumbersome. As the Nunalik’s lost weekend suggests, the West is only awakening to the challenge.

Russia, Gibson said, probably wouldn’t leave a cargo ship of military supplies drifting in a blizzard because port workers had gone home.

“We want to develop the north, we want to compete," he said with frustration. “But there’s no rush."

A Wall Street Journal reporter sailed with the Nunalik for three weeks. The 450-foot cargo vessel, owned by Canadian shipping company NEAS, set off from the port of Becancour, near Montreal, for its annual journey to Greenland, during the brief window when Arctic sealifts are possible.

At night, crews trained a searchlight across dark waters infested with so-called growlers—low-floating chunks of ice the size of trucks that can puncture ships. For almost the entire trip, the vessel sailed without another ship in sight. The 20-strong crew’s only outside company were pods of dolphins and killer whales, stray icebergs and the northern lights dancing across the night sky.

After being refused docking in Greenland, the ship anchored so close to shore that the barracks housing some 150 American servicemembers were clearly visible. Then things got worse.

The wind suddenly picked up to 50 knots and the Nunalik started dragging. The anchor dropped off a steep underwater slope and got tangled. The vessel drifted for four hours with a 2.5-ton anchor at the end of a 590-foot chain, amid icebergs and near an underwater fiber optic cable. Monday morning, after a weekend of snowsquall and whiteout conditions, the crew unloaded the cargo.

In a sign of how daunting Arctic operations can be, the Nunalik’s cargo wasn’t even destined for Greenland. From Pituffik, a plane would carry it farther north to Alert, a Canadian signals intelligence outpost only 500 miles from the North Pole—roughly the distance between New York and Detroit—and unreachable by cargo ship. A Canadian official said if anything was missing from the cargo, it could delay construction on the base by a year, until the next sealift.

Sailors have always struggled in these parts. In 1830, so many British whaling ships wrecked in the nearby Melville Bay that a thousand men were left stranded on the ice, where they set fire to their broken ships and drank heavily from rum casks for weeks until they were rescued.

If Russia were to launch a full-scale war against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Arctic would be central. Finland, Sweden and Norway, all sharing a border with Russia, have long prepared to fight a land war in subzero temperatures. In North America, a conflict would likely be aerial and maritime.

The Arctic Kola Peninsula hosts Russia’s Northern Fleet, with advanced land, air and naval assets, including some of its nuclear arsenal. The most direct way for Moscow to attack the U.S. with missiles is over the Arctic.

Because of Russia’s geographic advantage and the West’s own negligence, NATO is falling precipitously behind in the Arctic, said Troy Bouffard, director of the Center for Arctic Security and Resilience at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

“This is one of the only areas where we are not able to go toe-to-toe with our adversaries," he said. Now, as Russia’s land forces have been weakened by the war in Ukraine, the West has an opening to catch up. However, Western militaries are only just shifting focus after two decades of counterterrorism in the Middle East and Afghanistan. Many lessons learned there cannot be applied in the high north. Building a significant military presence in the Arctic will have to be done almost from scratch, Bouffard said.

“We are in the beginning of one of the hardest challenges ever," comparable only to exploring space, he said. “I don’t know which one is tougher."

President Trump in an executive order in January called missiles “the most catastrophic threat facing the United States." He said the U.S. would deploy a next-generation missile shield—a “Golden Dome" for America—and called on allies to increase cooperation on missile defense technology.

The West’s missile detection in the Arctic currently relies on early warning systems at Pituffik and other radar sites across Alaska and northern Canada.

Canada has pledged 6 billion Canadian dollars, equivalent to $4.3 billion, in partnership with Australia, to develop over-the-horizon radar and modernize the capabilities of the North American Aerospace Defense Command. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has committed troops to a more sustained year-round presence in the Arctic.

Russia has for decades expanded its bases in the Arctic. China has declared itself a near-Arctic nation and deployed ice breakers and research vessels. A Chinese research vessel called Xue Long 2 transited close to Canadian territorial waters this summer for the second year in a row. Canadian and U.S. aircraft last year intercepted Chinese and Russian bombers in international airspace near Alaska, the first joint patrol between the two in the approaches to North America.

The war in Ukraine highlights several other problems facing the West in the Arctic. It has shown the importance of resupplying troops, which is inherently difficult in the high north. It has also displayed Russia’s willingness to use purported hypersonic cruise missiles, which the West currently doesn’t have adequate defenses for.

Hypersonic missiles fly at at least five times the speed of sound, in unpredictable paths at a low altitude that make them hard for radar to detect. Russia has said it has used the missiles in Ukraine, though some have been intercepted. China has been developing and testing hypersonic missiles since 2017.

The U.S. is building space sensors to track hypersonic and ballistic missiles from orbit. Canada’s promised over-the-horizon radar is meant to detect low-flying missiles over the North Pole. ​Such detection is a necessary first step in building deterrence, analysts say.

“We have to demonstrate to the Russians and the Chinese that we are as modern and capable of deterring their forces as we were during the Cold War," said Rob Huebert, director of the University of Calgary’s Center for Military, Security and Strategic Studies. “You’ve got to develop your own warfighting capabilities, and that in fact becomes a form of deterrence, albeit a very dangerous one. But again, we don’t really have an alternative."

The Nunalik, one of the few Western cargo vessels capable of operating in the Arctic, mainly transports goods to remote Canadian Inuit communities, which depend on outside supplies for nearly everything. Gibson said he expected shipping companies in the Arctic to receive more business from Western armed forces.

Pituffik, formerly Thule Air Base, was built in 1951, and is the last remaining of more than a dozen U.S. bases built in Greenland during the Cold War under a treaty with Denmark, which controls the autonomous island. Trump’s attempts to take control of the island have caused friction within NATO.

The northernmost U.S. military installation, Pituffik is a collection of barracks, hangars, fuel tanks and satellite-dish domes shaped like giant golf balls. A sleepy community center offers slot machines, pool and darts. Musk oxen and snowshoe hares inhabit the base perimeter. Last year, the base imposed a curfew on its personnel because a polar bear was strolling around the airstrip.

Behind the base, the vast empty ice sheet stretches for more than 600,000 square miles. On a concrete plateau on a mountain overlooking the ice-dotted fjord sits the base’s radar building, a massive brutalist structure shaped like a concrete-and-steel trapezoid.

Reaching Alert, in northern Canada, is an even greater challenge. Such outposts provide signals intelligence, particularly on Russia’s Northern Fleet, long-range bombers, missile units and submarines capable of carrying nuclear weapons.

The base is supplied weekly by the Canadian Air Force, and twice a year with bigger airlifts of fuel and cargo. Larger sealifts via Greenland are only possible four to five months a year.

In 1991, five people were killed when a Hercules transport aircraft crashed on final approach to Alert, 10 miles from the base. It took rescue workers more than 30 hours to reach the site, navigating a blizzard and 24-hour darkness, and an additional two days to rescue the last survivors.

Write to Sune Engel Rasmussen at sune.rasmussen@wsj.com