Defence and Human Security

Russia’s Arctic Defense Posture

Posted on: January 18th, 2021 by Ernie Regehr

The Arctic and World Order is a Johns Hopkins University project which editors Kristina Spohr and Daniel S. Hamilton describe as an exploration of the “…political, legal, social, economic, geostrategic and environmental challenges confronting the Arctic in the face of global warming and a shifting world order….”

Here is the link for my contribution:

Chapter 8 – “Military Infrastructure and Strategic Capabilities: Russia’s Arctic Defense Posture” by Ernie Regehr

The links for free download of the complete book or purchase of hard copy below.

The Arctic and World Order

Kristina Spohr and Daniel S. Hamilton, Editors
Jason C. Moyer, Associate Editor

List of Chapters:

Foreword

Introduction – From Last Frontier to First Frontier: The Arctic and World Order by Kristina Spohr and Daniel S. Hamilton

Chapter 1 – Shifting Ground: Competing Policy Narratives and the Future of the Arctic by Oran R. Young

Chapter 2 – Conservation in the Arctic by Henry P. Huntington

Chapter 3 – Greenland, the Arctic, and the Issue of Representation: What is the Arctic? Who Has a Say? by Inuuteq Holm Olsen

Chapter 4 – A Tipping Point for Arctic Regimes: Climate Change, Paradiplomacy, and a New World Order by Victoria Herrmann

Chapter 5 – Russia and the Development of Arctic Energy Resources in the Context of Domestic Policy and International Markets by Arild Moe

Chapter 6 – Governance and Economic Challenges for the Global Shipping Enterprise in a Seasonally Ice-Covered Arctic Ocean by Lawson Brigham

Chapter 7 – Climate Change and the Opening of the Transpolar Sea Route: Logistics, Governance, and Wider Geo-economic, Societal and Environmental Impacts by Mia M. Bennett, Scott R. Stephenson, Kang Yang, Michael T. Bravo, and Bert De Jonghe

Chapter 8 – Military Infrastructure and Strategic Capabilities: Russia’s Arctic Defense Posture by Ernie Regehr

Chapter 9 – Freedom of the Seas in the Arctic Region by J. Ashley Roach

Chapter 10 – Constant and Changing Components of the Arctic Regime by Alexander N. Vylegzhanin

Chapter 11 – The U.S.-Canada Northwest Passage Disagreement: Why Agreeing to Disagree Is More Important Than Ever by Suzanne Lalonde

Chapter 12 – Power, Order, International Law, and the Future of the Arctic by Nengye Liu

Chapter 13 – The ‘Regime’ Nature of the Arctic: Implications for World Order by Lassi Heininen

Chapter 14 – Arctic Exceptionalisms by P. Whitney Lackenbauer and Ryan Dean

Chapter 15 – The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Three Levels of Arctic Geopolitics by Andreas Østhagen

Chapter 16 – Inside, Outside, Upside Down? Non-Arctic States in Emerging Arctic Security Discourses by Marc Lanteigne

About the Authors

The Pandemic and DND’s Public Service Mandate

Posted on: December 7th, 2020 by Ernie Regehr

Public awareness of Canadian Armed Forces’ (CAF) aid to civilian governments and agencies has once again come to the fore in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Military assistance to civil authorities is routine in Canada and variously includes emergency help in law enforcement, humanitarian relief, natural disaster recovery, and search and rescue. From the earliest days of the present pandemic, critically important CAF resources have been mobilized. An emerging question is whether these core civilian support roles, for which there is increasing demand, should be elevated for priority attention in military planning, training, and procurement, or whether they should continue to be treated as spin-offs from the primary combat-readiness focus of the Armed Forces. Continue Reading… at The Simons Foundation.

Should Canada’s military be restructured to increase its response to health crises and natural disasters?

Posted on: July 20th, 2020 by Ernie Regehr

Ernie Regehr and David Bercuson debate the issue in a “Face to Face” discussion in Legion Magazine, July 2, 2020.

Ernie begins the debate: “Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the Canadian Armed Forces declared it was ready to mobilize up to 24,000 troops to “assist with humanitarian support, wellness checks, natural disaster responses and other tasks as required.”

“By mid-April, Canadian Rangers were assisting pandemic response efforts in Northern Quebec communities and CAF medical teams were deploying to alleviate staffing shortages in long-term care centres.

“Manitoba floods, Toronto snowstorms, eastern ice storms, western forest fires, Northern Ontario drinking water emergencies—all these have involved military mobilizations in support of civilian authorities.

The North Warning System (NWS) and “what we cannot defeat”

Posted on: March 14th, 2020 by Ernie Regehr

When a Canadian Armed Forces official recently told an Ottawa security conference that “we cannot deter what we cannot defeat, and we cannot defeat what we cannot detect,” his audience may well have heard it as the credible proclamation of a prudent and resolute defence posture. In truth, the statement seems to run counter to decades of defence policy and practice. It ignores the inconvenient reality that there is no defence against a nuclear attack, even though current and planned early warning systems ensure that such an attack would be reliably detected. Continue reading at The Simons Foundation.

Pan-Arctic Military Cooperation: still the most reliable (and likely?) option

Posted on: January 9th, 2020 by Ernie Regehr

It is now seemingly routine for pundits and security professionals to warn of an impending militarized scramble for dominance over the lands, seas, and resources of the Arctic, with Russia enjoying a formidable advantage – all evidenced by the undeniable expansion of military facilities throughout the region. But it’s not clear that the official West is buying it. The Americans have ratcheted up the rhetoric, but little else has changed. The 2019 NATO summit ignored the Arctic, and individual states like Canada and Norway are sticking with a more nuanced and restrained posture on Arctic security. Continue reading at The Simons Foundation.

Is the North Warning System obsolete?

Posted on: January 2nd, 2020 by Ernie Regehr

The American commander of Norad claims that today’s security environment is “more competitive and dangerous” than any in recent generations, and that makes the case for modernizing the North Warning System. But upgrades to this northern transcontinental line of surveillance radars—deployed in support of sovereignty, air defence and frontier controls—are necessary regardless of threat levels.

The NWS joins Pacific and Atlantic coastal radars in monitoring air approaches to Canadian territory. Norad and the Canadian Armed Forces track and identify some 200,000 civilian aircraft that approach or enter Canadian airspace annually. The mission is to sort out which of those represent challenges to Canadian security, law enforcement or public safety.

…

“The point of the NWS, is and will remain, domain awareness—awareness of events within and in the approaches to Canadian territory—and modernization of the system should be driven less by the return of “great power politics” and more by an acknowledgement that domain awareness is as important in peacetime as in crisis.”

…

See the debate at “Face to Face” in Legion Magazine…

How to build an architecture of peace, when destruction can rain down in mere minutes

Posted on: July 9th, 2019 by admin

Ernie Regehr and Douglas Roche

GLOBE AND MAIL

27 July 2019

The existence of 13,865 nuclear weapons held by nine countries has not been enough, seemingly, to demonstrate political power. Now science and technology are giving us faster, more precise methods of destroying “the enemy.” The name of this new danger: “hypersonic” missiles.

The United States, Russia and China are leading the way on the development of hypersonic missiles, purportedly capable of travelling at more than 15 times the speed of sound and striking any target in the world in a matter of minutes. They will be powerful enough to penetrate any building with the force of three to four tonnes of TNT.

Although hypersonics are intended to carry conventional explosives, as distinct from nuclear, that’s not the main threat right now. Hypersonic missiles, conventional or nuclear, will be capable of striking at an adversary’s nuclear arsenal. Given the very short warning times of such attacks, states with nuclear weapons will have to assess how to respond to such threats quickly, and may be tempted to bypass political consultation. Their systems will also be placed on even higher levels of alert, increasing paranoia and pressure.

And, of course, it is highly unlikely that hypersonic weapons will stay “conventional.” Indeed, Russia is already boasting that it can place nuclear warheads on its hypersonic missiles. We’re looking at a world where catastrophic destruction is possible – and with unimaginable speed.

If the world is getting to be a better place, as so many indicators of progress reveal, how can we tolerate the constant modernization of the killing process? Is our struggle ultimately against particular weapons systems, or is it against humanity’s more fundamental lust for perfecting the art of killing?

These are questions that are made relevant again with the emergence of what The New York Times Magazine recently called “unstoppable hypersonic missiles.” As Times writer R. Jeffrey Smith reminds us, there are no international agreements on how or when hypersonic missiles can be used, nor are there any plans to start such discussions. Instead, he says, the world now faces a new arms race with Russia and China – “one that could, some experts worry, upend existing norms of deterrence and renew Cold War-era tensions.”

The issue of hypersonic weapons should highlight the growing urgency of reconstructing a reliable nuclear-arms control regime. Such a system should place a legal obligation on all countries to pursue and complete comprehensive negotiations for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Stunningly, the reverse is happening: The U.S. and Russia continue to violate their disarmament obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, as they abandon other treaties.

Immediate steps are necessary. At a minimum, keep nuclear warheads off hypersonics; remove all nuclear systems from high-alert status to prevent false alarms from triggering nuclear catastrophe; commence negotiations to control hypersonic weapons before the emerging hypersonic arms race swings into a no-holds-barred contest among a small but widening circle of countries.

Of course, the dismal state of nuclear disarmament in this chaotic period of world history sometimes raises doubts about the effectiveness of the nuclear disarmament movement. But the arrival of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which buttresses the nearly 50-year-old Non-Proliferation Treaty, highlights the deepening humanitarian concern about the massive evil of nuclear weapons. Focusing only on nuclear disarmament is not enough to ensure sustainable world peace, but as long as nuclear weapons exist, there can be no world peace.

The new age of hypersonics reminds us that the agenda for peace is very long. It already includes curbing global warming, controlling cyberwarfare, promoting sustainable development, and continuing to learn that human rights include the right to be free of warfare.

Hypersonic marks another milestone in the development of instruments of warfare. We must respond by building a new architecture for peace. And one cornerstone of that architecture remains the abolition of nuclear weapons.

Ernie Regehr is chairman of Canadians for a Nuclear Weapons Convention. Douglas Roche is a former senator and the former Canadian ambassador for disarmament.

Face to Face: Should space be weaponized?

Posted on: July 2nd, 2019 by Ernie Regehr

July 2, 2019 by Legion Magazine

David J. Bercuson says “yes” and Ernie Regehr says “no.”

Read the debate at Legion Magazine.

Regehr side of the debate follows:

The secure and uninterrupted operation of satellites has become an essential requirement for contemporary civil-ian life and military operations. Communications, earth observation, navigation, positioning and scientific/technological advancement are all heavily dependent on satellites that are increasingly vulnerable to space debris and deliberate attack.

In the past two years, new satellites were launched at the rate of more than one per day, joining some 2,000-plus currently operational satellites, 3,000-plus defunct satellites, and hundreds of thousands of pieces of debris that circle the planet. Some 30,000 pieces of that celestial garbage measure more than 10 centimetres across and, travelling at 8 kilometres per second, a collision means total destruction and still more debris.

Weaponization of space consists of weapons aimed at space and weapons based in space. The former is being actively pursued and the latter more tentatively, owing primarily to complexity and cost. The United States, Russia, China and India have demonstrated anti-satellite (ASAT) weapon capacity, while the two Koreas, Japan, Iran and Israel are among states that could pursue ASAT capabilities.

A weapon deployed in space (for example, a weaponized laser beam) would immediately become a very expensive sitting duck, for the same reasons that any satellite is vulnerable to ASAT attack: they follow predictable orbital paths and lack evasive manoeuvrability.

The main result would be heightened insecurity throughout space due to an accelerating rash of ASAT testing and deployment that would surely follow.

The security of assets in space ultimately depends on norms and political/legal instruments to constrain both forms of weaponization, which is why non-weaponization of space has been a widely supported international objective ever since Sputnik.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans the deployment of nuclear weapons in space. That treaty and the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space both set out principles meant to preserve space for exclusively peaceful purposes and to maintain it as an operationally stable and safe environment.

Given the currently low appetite for arms control, to put it kindly, those admirable sentiments aren’t about to be converted into binding treaties. But there is still room to build norms and encourage safer practices. For example, states that remain intent on ASAT testing should at least be challenged to avoid direct hits on hard targets in space, generating more dangerous space debris.

However, preventing space weaponization requires more. It means putting the brakes on the current active development of weapons aimed at space and shelving aspirations to bring weapons based in space out of science fiction and into real military arsenals. Even in the current political climate, arms control does become more compelling when the weapon in question is extremely costly, untested and highly vulnerable to military counterattack. And that pretty much describes weapons based in space.

Another condition conducive to successful arms control also applies. Neither form of space weaponization—aimed at or based in space—is yet widely deployed, so it’s still a matter of deciding not to go down that perilous road, rather than having to shift into reverse on a road already taken.

Review: “A Nation of Feminist Arms Dealers?”

Posted on: May 10th, 2019 by Ernie Regehr

Canadian military export policies came to unusual public attention following Canada’s 2014 agreement to sell $15 billion worth of armored vehicles to Saudi Arabia. The deal was negotiated under the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and was subsequently given official approval, through the granting of export permits, by the Liberal Government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who was elected in 2015. In the debate that ensued, the greater indignation was reserved for the Liberals, who had come to power on the promise of a return to multilateralism and re-engagement with the United Nations—a posture that raised expectations of a renewed exercise of Pearsonian internationalism ^[rather than of record-breaking arms sales to one of the world’s most egregious violators of global human rights standards.

See Ernie Regehr’s H-Diplo review of: Srdjan Vucetic. “A Nation of Feminist Arms Dealers? Canada and Military Exports.” International Journal 72:4 (2017): 503-519.

Manufacturing the Fighter Gap

Posted on: May 1st, 2019 by Ernie Regehr

Deliveries of the used F-18 fighter aircraft that Canada is acquiring from Australia have begun. The point of the new purchase of old F-18s is to provide a temporary fix for the ostensible capability gap that was created by a redefinition of Canadian requirements. It was broadly understood as an unusually sudden insistence on an immediate need for up to 25 more fighter aircraft (18 for operational roles, possibly seven more for testing and spare parts), but it was also part of a pattern of arbitrarily changing requirements for air defence missions that remain essentially unchanged. Continue reading at The Simons Foundation.