Military

Arctic leaders and ambassadors from 20 countries will be meeting in Anchorage for the Arctic Encounter Symposium this week, with security of the region at top of mind.

The policy-focused forum is billed as the “largest Arctic convening in North America.”

“We’re hosting leaders from the U.S., Canada, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and then many states as well that have interests in the Arctic or are observer states with the Arctic Council,” said founder Rachel Kallander.

Notably missing from the list of participating nations: Russia.

The Arctic Encounter Symposium has taken on new importance since the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum, went dormant last year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s Russia‘s turn to chair the council and the other member countries have condemned the invasion. They put council meetings on pause until the chairmanship passes to Norway this year.

At the Arctic Encounter event, Norway’s senior Arctic official is scheduled to articulate his country’s priorities for during its two-year chairmanship of Arctic Council.

“At the top of many people’s minds is national security, and sort of the future of the Arctic Council, and the diplomatic efforts and cooperation among states in the Arctic, given the conflict that started last year with Russia,” she said.

The conference runs March 29 through March 31. Students can get free tickets to the conference sessions.

The Alaska-based 11th Airborne Division will host its first large-scale training exercise next week on ranges around Fort Wainwright and Eielson Air Force Base. That means more than 500 Army vehicles that’ll take part in the exercise will be traveling on the Parks Highway and the northernmost stretch of the Richardson Highway.

The exercise is called the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center-Alaska, and this year it’ll be hosted by the 11^th Airborne Division — not U.S. Army Alaska. That’s because the Army de-activated USARAK last summer and reactivated the 11th Airborne to assume command of Army Alaska-based troops and assets.

The change was part of the Army’s new Arctic strategy.

“It’s an ongoing effort to kind of regain the muscle memory that we had in years previous for dealing in Arctic temperatures and conditions and terrain,” says John Pennell, 11th Airborne spokesperson.

Observers have for years pointed out that Alaska-based soldiers frequently were deployed to faraway conflict zones in hot, arid places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Pennell says those rotations hindered the soldiers’ familiarity of how to operate in Arctic.

“We lost a lot of that knowledge, a lot of that ability, during the 20 years (when) we were focused primarily on rotating in to the global war on terrorism,” he said in an interview last week.

Another change in the exercise this year is the venue.

“The primary training area is going to be the Yukon Training Area, closer to Eielson Air Force, as opposed to the Donnelly Training Area, down near Fort Greely,” he said.

Army officials decided to move the exercises to the Yukon Training Area to determine whether it can accommodate large numbers of troops and equipment, he added. Some 8,000 soldiers and more than 500 military vehicles will take part in the exercise.

“In the past, we haven’t used it for this kind of a large-scale exercise,” he said. “So we’re wanting to put that area through its paces, as well as our forces.”

Pennell says participants in this year’s exercise will include special operations personnel, trainers from the Joint Readiness Training Center in Louisiana, and observers and soldiers with allied nations from Canada, Europe and Japan.

Military-vehicle traffic around Fairbanks, Parks Highway through April 6

Staging the exercises in the Yukon Training Area will mean the soldiers and equipment from Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson mainly will be traveling to and from Fort Wainwright over the Parks Highway and the northernmost 30 miles of the Richardson Highway.

“That doesn’t mean that you might not see a military vehicle over on the Rich,” he said, “but the Parks is our primary means of getting there.”

Convoys from JBER started rolling toward Fort Wainwright over the Parks Highway on Wednesday, and they’ll travel from Wainwright to the Yukon Training Area near Eielson and back over the Richardson Highway beginning next Wednesday. They’ll begin returning to JBER the following week, on April 6.

The state Department of Environmental Conservation is asking for public comments on new regulations for siting small nuclear reactors, like the one the military plans to set up at Eielson Air Force Base to generate electricity.

DEC released draft regulations on Thursday that outline the process of applying for a permit to build or install a nuclear facility in Alaska. According to an agency news release, the regulations were drafted in response to the Air Force’s Eielson Air Force Base Micro-Reactor Pilot Program, which calls for siting a microreactor at the base that’ll generate up to 5 megawatts when it begins operation four years now.

That’s about a third of the electrical output of Eielson’s existing coal-fired heat and power plant. The microreactor, about the size of a railroad boxcar, would provide back-up for the 70-year-old powerplant. The base already supplements the plant’s output with power purchases from Golden Valley Electric Association.

The new regulations would require applicants intending to set up a nuclear facility to, among other things, obtain a siting permit from DEC and get approval from cities or boroughs where the facility would be located — or from the Legislature, for facilities proposed for unincorporated areas within the state’s unorganized borough.

The proposed regulationss wouldn’t affect existing federal regulations that among other things require applicants to also obtain siting permits from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The NRC would continue to oversee all other aspects of the nuclear facility, including licensing, construction, operation, safety and security.

Alaskans may comment on the new regulations through May 11.

More than a dozen veterans shared their concerns with U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Denis McDonough and U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola (D-Alaska) during a listening session in Bethel last week.

“They stressed the high cost of living here in Bethel or in the Y-K Delta,” said Bethel’s Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) Post 10041 Commander Henry Hunter Sr. “Just to fly from Hooper Bay, I think it’s about $600 one-way. So it’s pretty expensive for those veterans.”

Peltola and McDonough answered their questions for nearly two hours on Feb. 23. Veterans said that they were concerned about the lack of benefits and internet access, Alaska’s high cost of living, and their concerns about the U.S. being dragged into a war between Russia and Ukraine.

When it comes to veterans in rural Alaska, McDonough said that citizens from rural communities across the country serve at a higher rate than citizens living in urban or suburban areas. When those servicemembers separate or retire, they often return home to their small communities.

Alaska Natives, in particular, serve at a high rate.

“I thought it was really important to come out here to Bethel and to see the particular life that our veterans here live,” McDonough said. “So that we are making sure that we’re getting care available to them, getting benefits that they’ve so earned and so richly deserve available to them in a reasonable way, not making them have to fly halfway across the biggest state in the union to get that done.”

One big issue that came up was the rate of veteran suicide. The most recent data available is from 2020, and one sobering metric is clear: more U.S. vets have died by suicide in the last 10 years than service members who died from combat in Vietnam. Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan is co-sponsoring a proposal for the VA to study the effects of medical cannabis on vets with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and chronic pain.

“We want to make sure they take a hard look at whether there isn’t a way for us to get better access to research, the potential uses of cannabis for things like PTSD,” McDonough said.

Veterans in attendance and at large said that they don’t think the government is doing enough. McDonough said the VA’s clinical priority is to reduce and end veteran suicide. Recently, the VA invested $3 million into an app for Native veterans to reduce suicide. McDonough said that it connects veterans who are at risk or in crisis to care in their home communities.

“So this is precisely the kind of activity that we wanted to invest in to see if we can grow it so that other veterans in Alaska, and then other veterans across the country, can get access in a timely way to the care they deserve,” McDonough said.

This is the second part of a series. Read the first part here.

Concerns about national security are heating up in the rapidly changing Arctic. In 2021, the U.S. Coast Guard opened a seasonal airbase in Kotzebue. The community was once home to a permanent Air Force station, but that closed in 1983, as the Cold War wound down.

In recent years, more fighter jets have been based in Alaska, cold weather training for soldiers here has increased and an effort to provide the U.S. Coast Guard with a new, state-of-the-art icebreaker is underway. Russia lies about 250 miles west of Kotzebue and conflict with Ukraine has only fueled discussion about whether a more permanent military presence along Alaska’s west coast is both needed and warranted.

“This is our table,” said Vice President of Lands for NANA Qaulluq Cravalho. “We have to make sure that we’re there when it comes to policy making decisions because there is activity happening.”

NANA is one of the largest Alaska Native corporations in the state. Cravalho is also a member of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission. She said any military buildup in Northwest Alaska should include input from Alaska Natives.

“People can think of the Arctic as this pristine place where there’s no activity happening and that might be relatively true. On the U.S. side, there’s not as much activity, but on the Russian side, there is and all of our food resources go over there and come back,” she said. “So, it’s all one environment. There’s a lot of risk associated with it, and so how do we make sure we’re at the table to define what it looks like?”

In recent years, the Arctic has seen a drastic increase in industrial marine traffic in the region. According to the Arctic Council, marine traffic increased by 44% through the Northwest Passage between 2013 and 2019. As a self-described Coastal Iñupiaq, Cravalho has concerns about what more ships and a beefed-up military presence might mean for subsistence resources in the region. People here are heavily reliant on marine mammals and fish that provide a sustained food source.

“When you’re harvesting, when you’re participating in these activities, this is how you learn our culture and our language,” she said. “This is how it’s passed down generation to generation, because of the close relationship with the land in the water. It’s a primary means not only to provide sustenance for ourselves and our people in our communities. It’s also a primary means for our culture to continue.”

That culture has become a defining feature in Nate Kotch’s life, since he arrived here from Hawaii in his early 20s.

“So, it was certainly a culture shock to me to some degree,” he said.

The Air Force stationed him here in in the 1970s. He is one of the last remaining Kotzebue residents that remembers when there was an active military station here. Today, it functions as a long range radar site, with minimal full time civilian staff.

“It’s taken time for me to even learn what the culture really is in the community,” Kotch said. “I mean, the Native community, you know? What are their values, what are their needs? You know, what are they looking for?”

After his time with the Air Force, he married into an Iñupiaq family and spent 27 years on Kotzebue’s City Council.

He said if the military ever decided to resurrect a base here, the community would need to be involved “because if that doesn’t happen that way, then there’s going to be a negative impact.”

Last October, the United States rolled out a new National Strategy for the Arctic Region. In a video posted to Twitter U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken included national security as one of four main pillars of a new National Security Strategy for the Arctic.

“We have no higher priority than defending our country and our people and securing the Arctic is key to that,” Blinken said.

Currently, a military buildup is just a discussion and no decisions have been made to move forward. There is talk of basing Coast Guard Personnel here permanently. There has also been talk of developing a naval base here, complete with a deep water port.

In early August, the Sound bustled with small boats. The fishermen inside lined up at a handful of docks, waiting to offload chum salmon. Overhead, small commuter planes shuttled cargo and passengers to nearby remote villages.

Qaulluq Cravalho said if the military does come this far north, the community will be ready.

“This community is not unfamiliar with it,” she said. “We’ve had a base here in the past. Certainly there’s always that risk of the community changing. So, it’s how we interact with that change that’s really important, right? You know, the tools and types of infrastructure needed to be present here have really changed over time.”

Kotzebue is set back from the open Chukchi sea by nearly 70 miles of shallow, protective water in Kotzebue Sound. So, even though marine traffic in the Arctic is increasing — it can feel far away here.

What 85-year-old elder James McClellan is delighted to focus on is the successful chum fishery.

He’s spent many afternoons sitting on the beach, peering through binoculars as boats pulled in to offload their catch. He said 2022 is the first summer he didn’t fish commercially.

“I just like living from the country,” he said with a smile. It’s good. It keeps you healthy.”

The night before, he said, he’d had salmon for dinner. “Oh, it was good! Fried salmon, fried potatoes and onions and, boy, it was good.”

As McClellan scanned the horizon, what he couldn’t see is beyond Kotzebue Sound: a growing traffic jam of industrial ships, a potential for increased conflict with a foreign neighbor and the unknown impacts of a changing climate on food resources, including the chum salmon.

This ongoing series is made possible through a grant from the Climate Justice Resilience Fund.

A series of broken rules and an environment of sloppy oversight led up to a Humvee crash last year that killed a young woman from Eagle River, according to facts laid out in an Air Force accident investigation report released last week.

The report provides the first public, detailed account from the military about what was happening on its Idaho base leading up to 19-year-old Air Force ROTC cadet Mackenzie Wilson’s death on June 24.

Idaho is already prosecuting another teenage ROTC cadet who was behind the wheel for manslaughter. But after months of Wilson’s mother pleading for answers, it’s still unclear if the military will take any disciplinary action against its own personnel, or make any changes to its base operations or ROTC programs.

The report does not directly address those topics. It does, however, explain why Wilson was in the Humvee in the first place. It wasn’t training, as the Air Force’s initial announcement about the death suggested.

Here’s how the bombing range manager, who said he routinely let untrained visitors drive Humvees, explained to investigators why he let the cadets drive in the first place.

“And the intent isn’t to obviously — is not to teach them how to drive the Humvee,” the manager said, according to an interview transcript in a more complete version of the report the Air Force gave Wilson’s mother last week. “The intent’s just to give them a little experience, right? Of — of — to coming out. It’s a morale thing, too, you know?”

Air Force rules require training, certification and licensing to drive Humvees.

Wilson and the 18 other ROTC cadets chosen for the four-day event at Idaho’s Mountain Home Air Force Base were college students — not in the military, but in a program that prepares them to be officers.

The report says they were given unsupervised access to drive the old Humvees around the Saylor Creek Bombing Range on the last day of the program.

At one point, Wilson and two other cadets took turns behind the wheel of a Humvee doing donuts. A civilian working in a range tower noticed dust kicking up and yelled at them to knock it off. The cadets didn’t hear him, according to interview transcripts.

Minutes later, the driver lost control of the Humvee on an unnamed gravel road between range buildings. It flipped and crashed. Only the driver had a seatbelt on.

A cadet riding in the backseat was ejected but was able to call 911. He made his way back to the Humvee and told the operator that Wilson was pinned under the Humvee with no pulse.

In the aftermath, Air Force investigators found out that the Humvees the cadets were driving were procured for use as bombing targets, and were not authorized for use as transportation. The range manager said he and other personnel regularly used the Humvees to support range operations.

The Humvees weren’t kept up in line with Air Force standards, and maintenance wasn’t documented. The investigators also found that the tires on the crashed Humvee were mismatched, which could have affected how it handled and contributed to losing control.

The Air Force’s lead investigator briefed Wilson’s mother, Jessica Swan, last week about his report. She wept.

In a text message, she said she was profoundly devastated, and that Air Force leadership was “acutely negligent.”

“(Their) inability to make sound decisions cost Mackenzie her life,” she wrote.

Swan said if the range manager or Air Force leadership had followed any one of the broken regulations, “Mackenzie would be alive.”

The range manager’s name is redacted in the Air Force’s report, but he identifies himself in interview transcripts as a longtime civilian employee who previously worked as chief of safety at Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks and Osan Air Base in South Korea. He said he even served as an accident investigator himself on three past cases.

The investigator in this case told the range manager he was suspected for the crime of misuse of government property. An ROTC officer who was supervising the cadets that week was also informed he was suspected of dereliction of duty under military code.

An Air Force public affairs officer at Mountain Home Air Force Base said in an email that higher-ups are reviewing the investigation to decide on next steps.

“We take very seriously our responsibility to address the contributing factors and events noted in the report in order to prevent similar mishaps in the future,” Master Sgt. Eric Harris wrote.

Air Force officials with the center that oversees the ROTC program did not respond to request for comment about impacts this case may be having on its programs.