If you’re going to defend Canada’s sovereignty in the High Arctic it is almost always a good idea to do it in the summer, and not to aim too high. Even then there are no guarantees. It’s a tricky business.
Earlier this month I sat in a briefing room in Iqaluit while an assortment of Canadian navy officers explained some last-minute amendments to Operation Nanook ’09. Every summer, Op Nanook is the Forces’ premier Arctic exercise. Every summer it has more moving parts and tackles more ambitious goals. Prime Minister Stephen Harper takes this Arctic business very seriously. He has personally gone up north every summer since he was elected in 2006. He likes to say that in the quest to protect Canada’s North against various foreign marauders, the guiding principle should be “use it or lose it.” This year Op Nanook would use Canadian Forces soldiers, sailors and pilots; the Canadian Coast Guard; more than a dozen civilian ministries of the federal government; the entire federal cabinet, flown to Iqaluit for a cabinet meeting fuelled with fresh seal meat; and bewildering numbers of civilian and military public relations specialists, the better to orchestrate the Prime Minister’s assorted photo opportunities.
And it would have gone off without a hitch if it hadn’t been for the ice.
“Weather and ice has played havoc with my original intent to land the force by air and sea at BAF-3, the Northern Warning Site 120 nautical miles from Iqaluit to the northeast,” an email from Brig.-Gen. David Millar, the commander of Joint Task Force (North), informed me the day before I flew to Iqaluit.
Here’s what that meant. Military exercises are built around little scenarios. There’s an element of play-acting involved. In Op Nanook ’09 a navy frigate, HMCS Toronto, and a coast guard icebreaker, the Radisson, were to motor out of Iqaluit Bay and around the nose of Baffin Island to Brevoort Island where, they were to imagine, aerial surveillance had spotted an unmanned drone aircraft going down. Whose drone was it? Where did it land? A few dozen soldiers from an Arctic reserve company group were to land and poke around until they found the “drone” (“It’s made out of crutches, with duct tape,” one of the briefers admitted).
The point of it all was to show the world Canada’s military can work anywhere on our territory. The other point was to get better at what Millar called “tactical-integrated effect,” in which all three military services would work together and with civilians to accomplish a task.
The problem was that when the Toronto and the Radisson went out to Brevoort Island a few days early to look around, they found the waters of Davis Strait were thick with ice.
“It was bergy bits and growlers,” one sailor said: chunks of ice no bigger than a house, scrawny in iceberg circles but more than enough to end the single-hulled Toronto’s day in a hurry if things went awry. There’s just no way to predict the weather up here. “Even though we’ve got very talented met techs [meteorological technicians, or weathermen],” the sailor said, “it comes down to chicken bones and tea leaves at some point.”
Fortunately, the imagination of the Forces’ scenario planners is up to any task. Millar decided another mysterious drone had landed at Apex, a few minutes’ hike from downtown Iqaluit. The Toronto and the Radisson would go back to Iqaluit, weigh anchor, chug down Frobisher Bay for a day, turn right around and go back where they came from.
Which is precisely what happened, two days later. The reservists rose at dawn and rode in motorboats over ice-free water as smooth as marble to a beach at high tide a few paces from Iqaluit’s old Hudson’s Bay outpost. I was already onshore, watching with some officers and colleagues from an observation tent with a well-stocked snack tray.
The plan is for Op Nanook to drive further north every summer, in conditions that will be, in the jargon, successively more “austere.” Lancaster Sound in 2010. Isachsen in 2011. Alert, 2,092 km north of Iqaluit, in 2012.
