When Secretary of State William Seward closed the deal to buy what was then known as “Russian America” from Czar Alexander in 1867, he knew he’d pulled off the real estate steal of the century. It was 586,000 square miles of virgin land rich in natural resources at the bargain price of $7.2 million, a mere 2 cents an acre.
Though widely mocked at the time as “Seward’s Folly,” “Seward’s icebox,” and President Andrew Johnson’s “polar bear garden,” ratification of the treaty sailed through the Senate 37-2, thanks in great part to the oratorical skills of Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. He had championed the acquisition in an epic stemwinder on the Senate floor, at one point arguing it would give the United States more control over the next “great theater of action.”
And in that speech, it was Sumner who first referred to the new territory as “Alaska,” from the native Aleut word for “great land.”
But as prescient as Seward and Sumner were, they could never have imagined how vital Alaska would become in the 21st century, as America enters a perilous new era of great power competition, in which the U.S. military must deter, or be able to defeat, two near-peer adversaries, China and Russia.
To appreciate Alaska’s unique geographical advantage, you have to look down on the Earth as if you were in space over the North Pole.
From there, you can see that all of America’s potential adversaries, not just Russia across the Bering Strait but also China, North Korea, and Iran, are hundreds or thousands of miles closer to Alaska than any other point in the continental U.S.
The polar route is the path incoming missiles would take to reach major cities in the U.S., or as former Defense Secretary Ash Carter put it in 2015, Alaska is “kind of on the way to and from a lot of bad places.”
This is why Alaska is the heart of America’s missile defense, with 40 interceptor missiles on standby in silos at Fort Greely, with an additional 22 missiles to be added this year.
It’s why the U.S. has decided to base 100 of its best fighter jets, a mix of F-35s and F-22s, in Alaska, making it the home to more advanced fighters than any other location in the world.
During a recent inspection tour of Alaska’s Eielson Air Force Base, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said he came away with a “keen reminder of just how strategically important Alaska is to our national security and to homeland defense.”
“We are an Indo-Pacific nation, and we are an Arctic nation, and here in Alaska, those two critical regions intersect,” Austin said in a news conference. “This is where we can project power into both regions and where we must be able to defend ourselves from threats coming from both places.”
Accompanying Austin on his tour was Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve, whose singular mission since arriving in Congress in 2015 has been to prod the Pentagon into rebuilding and expanding military capabilities in Alaska, which had fallen to a low priority after the end of the Cold War.
“You would be surprised at how many very senior military officials have not spent much time in Alaska,” Sullivan told the Washington Examiner in an interview. “And then, when they get up there, the same thing happens — you can just see their eyes literally opening.”
One of the first things Sullivan did upon taking his seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee was to review the Pentagon’s Arctic policy drawn up in 2013.
Sullivan declared it “a joke of a strategy.” Then, at hearings, he grilled Pentagon leaders about the lightweight document, which he noted were but 13 pages, six of which were pictures, with Russia mentioned only once, in a footnote.
But in the years since, Sullivan said the Armed Services Committee, “in a very bipartisan way,” has been pushing the Pentagon to get serious. The Army, the Navy, and the Air Force have all released revamped strategy papers within the last year.
The Army strategy is focused on a power projection response in a crisis with forces such as the 1st Striker Brigade, based at Fort Wainwright, Alaska, the only airborne brigade combat team in the entire Asia Pacific and the reserve force for a Korean contingency.
“Those units can be anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere from Alaska within seven hours,” Sullivan said.
The Navy strategy centers on expanding its presence and building “a more capable Arctic naval force,” as rapidly melting sea ice over the coming decade results in increasingly navigable Arctic waters.
The Air Force sees Alaska’s proximity to potential enemies as a two-edged sword.
While “Alaska offers the quickest flight access to strategic locations across the Pacific region and western Russia,” the strategy notes, “it is also the shortest distance for adversaries to threaten the homeland with strategic air and missile attacks.”
“If you look at the services’ recent Arctic strategies, they’re all good,” said Sullivan, who authored an amendment to this year’s National Defense Authorization Act to create an Arctic Security Initiative, which is modeled on similar legislation for Europe and the Pacific region and would fund the services’ new strategies.
As the Army’s strategy points out, high on the list of priorities is building new bases and upgrading old ones.
“Infrastructure in many austere locations has already deteriorated due to extreme environmental factors,” including repeated freeze and thaw cycles and permafrost degradation, the report warns.
“We need infrastructure. We need military assets. We need presence. It’s starting to happen, but we got a long way to go,” Sullivan said.
A big step will be the planned construction of a deep-water Arctic port in Nome, Alaska, near the Bering Strait, the gateway to the Arctic Ocean, which Russian President Vladimir Putin has dubbed “the new Suez Canal” and vowed to control.
“Right now, the only ports in Alaska that could handle a destroyer or an icebreaker are either Anchorage or Dutch Harbor out on the Aleutian island chain,” Sullivan, who pointed out that Anchorage is 1,500 nautical miles from the Bering Strait, said.
“Think about it. Having Anchorage cover the Bering Strait region, which is where all the shipping’s happening, would be like having Miami cover Boston,” he said. “We wouldn’t accept that on the East Coast, and we shouldn’t accept that in the Arctic region of America.”
When Sullivan is schooling the initiated about the strategic value of Alaska, he has a favorite quote he likes to trot out from aviation visionary Billy Mitchell, the one-star Army general considered to be the father of the U.S. Air Force.
In testimony before the House Committee on Military Affairs in 1935, Mitchell famously said, “I believe that, in the future, whoever holds Alaska will hold the world. … I think it is the most important strategic place in the world.”
As for the prescience of Seward and Sumner in recognizing the value of Alaska 154 years ago, Sullivan said they “knew what the hell they were doing.”
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
