Wall Street Journal:
When the U.S. wants to learn what Russia is doing in the Arctic, it often turns to the Norwegian military, which has been conducting operations for decades from this Arctic town amid the fiords.
These days, it isn’t the volume of Russian military activity in the region that concerns Norway and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies. Adm. Haakon Bruun-Hanssen, Norway’s chief of defense, says Russian military activity in the Barents Sea has grown in recent years but still pales in comparison to Cold War levels.
What concerns him, he says, is the increased sophistication Norway is seeing in the far north, as the Kremlin modernizes its armed forces. NATO forces retain an upper hand in conventional equipment and prowess, he said, but Russia is catching up with new sensors, submarines and capabilities.
“The equality between Russian military capability and Western military capability has started to come very close to each other, like it used to be in the Cold War,” Adm. Bruun-Hanssen said in an interview during a recent trip to Bodo by U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter.
While the number of Russian intercepts and operations is “far smaller” than during the Cold War, he said, “the difference is now we are talking about new types of platforms, new types of sensors, new types of weapons systems that are far more flexible and far more capable than we had during the Cold War.”
The buildup has served as a wake-up call to U.S. military officials, especially as diplomatic ties with Moscow fray over Syria, and to European countries such as Norway, which scaled back their defenses in the 1990s and early 2000s after the Soviet Union’s collapse.
NATO officials say they have been stepping up antisubmarine and other naval exercises as part of their efforts to deter Russian aggression, conducting an antisubmarine exercise this summer in the Norwegian sea with eight allies.
But an alliance official said it was critical to pursue diplomatic measures to keep tensions in the Arctic in check.
“Five allies are Arctic states, and we believe it is important to think of the high north as an area of low tensions,” the official said. “We seek the right balance between military presence and keeping tensions low.”
President Vladimir Putin promised in 2010 to spend more than 20 trillion rubles—some $650 billion at the time—to modernize 70% of all Russian military equipment by 2020 and better project power outside Russia.
U.S. Vice Adm. James Foggo III, commander of the U.S. Navy’s Sixth Fleet, recently warned that Russia is rapidly closing the technology gap. “Nowhere is this more evident than in the maritime (and especially underwater) domain,” Adm. Foggo and analyst Alarik Fritzwrote in the June issue of the U.S. Naval Institute’s magazine.
The U.S., they wrote, again finds itself in a “technological arms race” with Russia, adding that more submarines, anti-submarine warfare forces and carrier strike groups should be rotated through Europe while the U.S. works to maintain its edge.
The Pentagon has requested $3.4 billion for the coming fiscal year to bolster European allies, four times last year’s funding level. It is part of a broader effort to improve NATO’s posture to deter any Russian action.
Norway’s right-wing minority government seeks to boost military spending to 53 billion kroner ($6.6 billion) by 2020, an 8% increase from this year, to comply with NATO’s demand that members spend at least 2% of their gross domestic product on defense by 2024.
The oil-rich country of 5.2 million people now spends about 1.5% of its GDP on defense.
Russia has already demonstrated its revived capabilities. Late last year, it fired 26 medium-range cruise missiles at targets in Syria from four warships in the Caspian Sea. Two months later, a Russian advanced Kilo-class stealth submarine shot cruise missiles at targets in Syria from the Mediterranean Sea.
“They showed us that the technology now is on board their ships, it works, they have the information to fire at those ranges in a conventional submarine, and that the external support they need to do it works,” Adm. Bruun-Hanssen said. “It suddenly indicates different capability in a platform from where they used to be.”
The change carries ramifications for Norway, which has a border within 100 miles of Russia’s largest naval fleet in Murmansk. Norway doesn’t classify Russia as an enemy, and has tried to walk a fine line with its neighbor since joining NATO in 1949. American U-2 pilot Gary Powers was heading to land in Bodo, on Norway’s Atlantic coast just north of the Arctic Circle, when the Soviet Union shot down his spy plane in 1960….
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