NORAD Renewal and a Team Canada approach to security

See The Simons Foundation Canada's Arctic Security Briefing Papers for information on military policies and practices in the Arctic region by Ernie Regehr O.C., Senior Fellow in Arctic Security and Defence at The Simons Foundation Canada

NORAD Renewal and a Team Canada approach to security

Analysts and pundits now routinely warn that Canada must urgently beef up Arctic defences to protect Canadian sovereignty and territory from the expansionist ambitions of strategic adversaries – Russia and China (and these days, we could add a third). NORAD ‘modernization” is a primary response, and Ottawa has announced the planned expenditure of an initial $38 billion over 20 years on the project. But what are the targets to be defended, and against what weapons? NORAD has in fact always been focused on defending the more southerly regions of the continent against threats coming via the North, rather than the Arctic itself. A renewed NORAD, in the face new generations of conventionally armed missiles, promises to largely maintain that core mission. Though the strategic environment is obviously changing, threats of direct attack on the Canadian Arctic are still broadly deemed to remain low. Furthermore, the security of the Canadian North, indeed of all of Canada, depends on a much deeper “whole-of-society”[i] effort. 

Despite growing concerns and warnings, military combat in the Arctic, especially in its North American zone, continues to be regarded as unlikely, with Canada’s new Arctic Foreign Policy concluding that “the risk of military attack in the North American Arctic remains low”[ii] – though it is not impossible.

One credible scenario that could draw the High North into direct military combat points to spillover into the European Arctic from a NATO/Russia shooting war in Europe. That also seemed unlikely until February 2022 but is now dangerously feasible. Should such a war erupt on NATO territory, the most predictable outcome would be unconscionable devastation, and the only rational response would be to end it. But Russia could be expected to have its Arctic Northern Fleet forces move to take the fight into the North Atlantic in order to, for example, disrupt shipping lanes and communication cable links between Europe and North America. NATO’s interest would be the inverse of that – to engage Russian naval forces from the Kola Peninsula before they could reach the North Atlantic, with an added interest in preventing Kola-based air and infantry forces from aiding Russia’s fight in Europe. The most immediate way to significantly decrease the odds of such an escalating European Arctic catastrophe is obviously to end Russia’s devastating war on Ukraine and, in the meantime, all must hope that current Russian and NATO forbearance regarding direct attacks on each other continues to hold. 

And besides the myriad physical challenges and consequences that should give pause to warfighting in the Arctic, it remains that all Arctic, or “near Arctic,” states still share a basic interest in avoiding regional military hostilities. Russia and China notably have compelling reasons to try to keep military instability away from the Northern Sea Route (NSR). Russia has shown itself quite capable of acting against its own apparent interests, but it is still the case that its Arctic resource extraction depends on being able to routinely ship those products to markets via the NSR – meaning a climate of high tension that threatens even low intensity armed conflict would definitely be bad for business. Conditions that threaten to interrupt Russia’s oil and gas and other operations are a serious threat to Russia’s economic well-being, and China certainly wants the NSR to become a stable, reliable, route that cuts the shipping time between China and Europe by some 10 days.

Climate change obviously also brings with it key changes to the Arctic security climate (see recent, sobering, reporting^[iii]). Increased access to and use of northern territory, including for military purposes, demands greater vigilance and situation awareness. The responsible exercise of sovereignty must include ongoing policy and material support for the well-being of people and communities that work and live there, and not the least of that obligation, whatever the strategic environment, is a timely emergency response infrastructure, as well as ongoing military support to civilian authorities with primary responsibility for border control and public safety.

1. Threats to the Arctic

In contemplating threats facing the Canadian Arctic, the historian and Arctic security analyst, Prof. Whitney Lackenbauer of Trent University, has helpfully categorized potential threats and attacks as being to, in, or through the Arctic.[iv] 

He describes threats to the Canadian Arctic as “those that emanate from outside of the region and affect the region itself.” Such threats could include attacks on Arctic infrastructure, but his examples point to non-military threats. For example, a foreign ship in Canadian waters could run aground and contaminate its environs, or a “non-like-minded state” could gain ownership or control of a company with a strategically located airfield. 

Threats in the Arctic are those that “originate within the region and have primary implications for the region.” Here too, the examples are non-military threats to human security – like the failure of a generator in an isolated community, the degradation of permafrost that threatens critical infrastructure, or “longstanding inequalities” endured by indigenous populations related to essentials like “transportation, energy, communications, employment, community infrastructure, health services, and education….” 

Canada’s Arctic Foreign Policy also links human security to national security by making the important point that “strong and resilient Arctic and northern communities increase Canada’s defence against threats.” Adversaries are poised to exploit festering inequalities and tensions related to chronic deficits in economic and communications infrastructure, inadequate heath care facilities, and similar failures in order to disrupt and erode trust in national and local institutions. Thus current Canadian policy rightly concludes that “Canada must take action to build trust in public institutions….”[v] In other words, domestic stability, good governance, and trust in public institutions make important, essential, contributions to national security and warding off malicious foreign interventions, including ultimately military threats.[vi] Lackenbauer thus sees a clear need for what he calls “a whole-of-society approach” to Arctic security. All the “opportunities, challenges, increased competition, and risks associated with a more accessible (and unpredictable) Arctic require a greater presence of security organizations, strengthened emergency management, and improved situational awareness.”[vii]

Lackenbauer characterizes the through threats as those that “emanate from outside the region and pass through or over it to strike targets also outside the region.”[viii] A prime example would be a nuclear armed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launched from the Russian heartland and headed for the American heartland over the Arctic. Or it could be Russian nuclear bombers flying the shortest route to the Canadian and American heartlands.

Another prominent Canadian Arctic security analyst, Prof. Rob Huebert of the University of Calgary, offers a clear description of the threats that are animating NORAD modernization.[ix] He argues that the serious Arctic threat is not to “sovereignty” but to “security.” There are, to be sure, sovereignty issues that need attention – like acknowledgement of the waters of Northwest Passage as internal to Canada, the Beaufort Sea boundary dispute with the United States, overlapping claims to extended continental shelves – but these are challenges to be managed to ensure that it is diplomats, lawyers, and scientists who remain the prime responders. The most immediate military challenge, says Huebert, is to convincingly demonstrate to Russia that it could never “launch a surprise missile attack across the Arctic to American targets with a chance of succeeding” – those targets being in the more southerly Canadian and American heartlands. 

Both Huebert and Lackenbauer thus see the threats passing through the Arctic to targets in the American and Canadian heartlands as the focus of the military responses, and it is that same category of threats that drives NORAD modernization. Canada’s Arctic Foreign Policy essentially agrees that the basic military threats in the Arctic are the threats of attacks passing through the region: the Arctic “region represents a geographic vector for traditional and emerging weapons systems that threaten broader North American and transatlantic security.” 

There is little prospect that the capacity to defeat threats travelling through or over the Arctic will ever be comprehensive. There is simply no sure defence against Russian or Chinese nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile attacks via the Arctic on North America. Realistically, there is also no comprehensive defence against massed strategic bombers bearing nuclear-armed, air-launched, cruise and hypersonic missile attacks on North America. These systems represent an existential threat, yet there is no reliable defence against them. 

US policy relies on nuclear deterrence to prevent such attacks, and durable prevention requires reliable domain awareness and early warning (that being NORAD’s role), and ongoing diplomacy aimed at stabilizing relations with adversaries, confidence building measures towards that end, firm limits on weapons through arms control, and concrete steps toward the total nuclear disarmament that nuclear powers have declared to be their ultimate objective – the kind of policies which Canada should promote from its seat at the continental security table. 

2. NORAD priorities

NORAD’s current defence focus is not on the nuclear threat to the continent – that is understood to be covered by nuclear deterrence (for which NORAD provides early warning). The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) and NORAD (the joint Canada/US North American Aerospace Defence Command) are thus mandated to provide early warning of nuclear armed missile attacks (but not defence against them), and early warning and control or defence against attacks and unauthorized civilian entries into North American air space, as well as maritime early warning and regional domain awareness.^[x] A major preoccupation is the emergence of new generations of conventionally armed hypersonic missiles (able to travel at least five times the speed of sound within the atmosphere). 

In 2020, two US Generals, a former Commander of NORAD and a Deputy Director for Operations of NORAD, elaborated on the latter concern in a paper entitled “Hardening the Shield.”^[xi] A much improved shield, they argued, is needed to protect the North American homeland, especially from emerging threats of conventional missile attacks by states like Russia and China on military and non-military infrastructure in the American heartland. A key element of the argument is that adversaries seeking to defeat or intimidate American forces in overseas operations could threaten conventional attacks on America at home – to threaten hit-and-run attacks on vital infrastructure, interrupt American military mobilization efforts, and generally to demonstrate to an American population that military interventions abroad could expose their homeland to retaliatory conventional attacks on key military, and civilian, infrastructure:

“If the traditional American way of war is the deployment of overwhelming force to a fight overseas, then the way to defeat the United States military in the next war, in the minds of her adversaries, is to prevent deployment in the first place. Either through the threat of attacks on economic targets designed to constrain options, or direct strikes on mobilizing forces, the deployment of the American military must be stopped before it starts. The economic engine and carefully orchestrated multi-modal logistical movements that enable the world’s preeminent military are now a target.”

The key worry is that both Russia and China are busy developing, and deploying, long-range cruise and hypersonic missiles, for example, against which the homeland missile defence system (designed to intercept missiles in outer space) is defenceless because cruise and hypersonic missiles do not operate in outer space. And while North America is considered to be protected from nuclear attack by deterrence, that same deterrence is thought not to be effective against conventional attack, notably by those emerging hypersonic missiles. So that is why both Russia and China are developing missiles explicitly to evade space-borne missile defences and that are capable of delivering conventional warheads. The point is that Russia and China want a non-nuclear option for attacking military or civilian infrastructure in the United States on the assumption that a limited conventional attack would not immediately trigger “devastating retaliation by the nuclear triad of United States Strategic Command.” The calculation is that “using nuclear weapons against targets in North America in an attempt to alter the outcome of a regional conflict [overseas] would be suicidal, and so they [Russia and China] set out on a deliberate path of conventional long-range weapons development.”[xii]

And since potential North American targets are obviously far too numerous to be protected by “hardening,” or to have their own localized missile defences, some analysts insist it is necessary to mount a capacity to destroy Russian and Chines missile platforms before they are in range to fire their missiles at the American heartland – but that kind of pre-emption obviously risks major escalation in a conflict. Dealing with this threat, O’Shaughnessy and Fesler thus argued, needs to become a key mission of NORAD, and since their flight paths would likely (but need not always) be through the Arctic, modernizing NORAD’s northern warning and interception missions is still deemed urgent. 

The implication is that NORAD upgrades are not so much a response to Arctic tensions and vulnerabilities as they are a response to the more tense and dangerous global strategic environment. NORAD renewal is also an attempt to maintain and protect the Pentagon’s ability, or freedom, to project force beyond North American shores. In reviewing the “Hardening the Shield” paper, the Canadian scholar and NORAD expert, Prof. Andrea Charron, has noted that the paper is “…a call for a new North American defence architecture that is both an integral cog in the US deterrence machinery [through early warning] and can ‘actively’ – i.e. offensively if necessary – defend the homeland so that the US military can maintain its superiority and freedom of manoeuvre.”^[xiii] 

Canada’s Arctic Foreign Policy makes essentially the same point about NORAD modernization and Canadian overseas operations, noting that since Russia is “equipped with missile systems capable of striking Europe and North America,” it is capable “of disrupting Canada’s ability to project forces in support of allies and partners,”^[xiv] notably in Europe.  Continue reading...

Ernie Regehr, O.C. is Senior Fellow in Arctic Security and Defence at The Simons Foundation Canada; Research Fellow at the The Kindred Credit Union Centre for Peace Advancement, Conrad Grebel University College, University of Waterloo; and co-founder and former Executive Director of Project Ploughshares.