Commander, USCG District 17, Juneau, AK - 19 February 2009
The joint mapping of the Arctic Ocean extended continental shelf by U.S. and Canadian Coast Guard icebreakers in 2008, and planned for 2009 as mentioned in my last entry, is an important but by no means the only way in which the two Coast Guards cooperate. Another is in improving our understanding of maritime activity in the Arctic.
Last month the Commander for the USCG 17th District in Juneau, reporting on Operation Salliq 2008, the USCG Arctic Initiative, characterized the two countries’ Coast Guards as “full partners in our Arctic initiatives.” Writing in the context of efforts to improve USCG Arctic Domain Awareness (ADA), the Commander reported that one of five such initiatives – biweekly flights of C-130s out of the USCG Air Station Kodiak during summer shipping season to observe maritime activity – were supplemented by cooperation with Canada: “Through engagement with the Canadian Coast Guard and Canada's Joint Task Force North in Yellowknife, we began intelligence sharing with Canada, enhancing the awareness of both countries.”
The four other prongs of Operation Salliq 2008 were i) employing the USCGC Polar Sea in homeland security, search and rescue and other missions in the Arctic, ii) resurrecting the long USCG tradition of deploying buoy tenders to remote native villages in Northern Alaska, focusing in 2008 on needed navigational aids, iii) inserting a “tailored force package” into Barrow, the idea being to “forward deploy helicopters and small boats to the North Slope and to use them as we would use them in Southern Alaska,” and v) a conceptual security exercise in Prudhoe Bay. Just one conclusion policy makers would do well to heed: “The existing infrastructure in the U.S. Arctic is insufficient to support prolonged or seasonal Coast Guard operations.” Specifics as to U.S. icebreaking capacity have been discussed elsewhere. More information on each of the five prongs of Operation Salliq is available in the District 17 Public Affairs online report, which emphasizes the centrality of engagement with Native Alaskan communities to the success of USCG Arctic Domain Awareness.
On the Canadian side, an Interim Report of the Standing Senate Committee on Fisheries and Oceans from June 2008 offers a comprehensive overview of “The Coast Guard in Canada's Arctic.” The Canadian report serves a much different purpose than the Operation Salliq report, and neither focuses primarily on cooperation between the two countries’ coast guards. Nonetheless, the existence of such cooperation is evident in both reports. For example, of commitments undertaken for last summer by the Canadian Coast Guard fleet in the Arctic and highlighted in the Canadian Senate report, at least three have distinct international components:
“• icebreaker participation in an Arctic environmental response exercise in Ilulissat (Greenland) with the United States and Denmark, the host country of the 2008 North Atlantic Coast Guard Forum;
• continued icebreaking support to the US Military Sealift Command off Greenland; and
• continued and significant activity related to IPY research and mapping of the Canadian continental shelf.”
In further contrast to the USCG report on Operation Salliq, the Canadian Senate report on the Canadian Coast Guard in the Canadian Arctic offers formal recommendations to policy makers for reinforcing Canadian sovereignty and presence in its Arctic, worth perusal in their original context, at pages 39 ff., as are the recommendations, at page 44, of a February 2008 Canada–U.S. Model Negotiation on Northern Waters. Speaking only to icebreaking capacity and not overall Canadian Coast Guard infrastructure in the Arctic, the report's observation that "(a)t present, the Coast Guard has a limited capacity to navigate in Canada’s Arctic," still provides an interesting complement to USCG conclusions about inadequate U.S. infrastructure capacity in the Arctic. Finally, the Canadian report recalls the existence of the 1988 Arctic Cooperation Agreement between Canada and the United States (also mentioned in a Parliamentary Arctic Chronology), which treaty serves as an important foundation for bilateral engagement in the region.
