By Federico Borsari and Gordon B. "Skip" Davis, Jr.

Harnessing Uncrewed Capabilities for Arctic Defense and Security

Full document published by CEPA: https://cepa.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/CEPA-High-Stakes-in-the-High-North-Report-1.pdf

Executive Summary

As climate change, militarization, and new technologies reshape the Arctic, the
region is becoming a central arena of great power competition. Russia’s expanding
military presence and China’s dual-use investments heighten strategic pressure on
NATO’s northern flank. Uncrewed and autonomous vehicles (UxVs or UxS; referred
to throughout this paper as “drones”) offer cost-effective ways to enhance domain
awareness, deterrence, and resilience, across intelligence, targeting, logistics,
and crisis-response missions. Yet harsh operational conditions, infrastructure
gaps, adequate investment, and procurement obstacles hinder their integration
and exploitation. Procurement of Arctic-capable drones across NATO remains
fragmented, slow, and risk-averse, as most allies prioritize systems designed for
temperate climates and only later adapt them for Arctic use, thus resulting in few
NATO-certified Arctic-ready platforms.

To preserve a competitive edge and reinforce deterrence, NATO and its Arctic allies
must integrate winterized uncrewed capabilities across the three physical domains.
For such an effort to succeed, however, they must also reform procurement
processes, accelerate joint acquisition, update doctrine and training models,
improve intelligence and information sharing, expand support infrastructure, and
ensure interoperability, among other priorities. Overall, uncrewed vehicles should
complement rather than replace traditional assets, expanding situational awareness,
enabling “deterrence by detection,” and providing more targeting options across
the High North. Ultimately, NATO’s ability to embed these systems into planning,
training, and innovation frameworks will determine whether the alliance can turn
technological potential into credible deterrence and defense in one of the world’s
most demanding environments.

Introduction

“A secure Europe, a secure Atlantic, and a secure Arctic are priorities for NATO and essential for America’s long-term security.” – Mark Rutte, NATO Secretary General

The Arctic is emerging as a decisive arena in the evolving global security landscape. Long perceived as a remote and stable region, this vast territory is now marked by accelerating geopolitical competition, climate-driven transformations, and technological disruption. Melting ice and shifting sea routes are opening new corridors for trade, energy exploration, and military access. For NATO and its allies, this transformation raises pressing strategic and operational questions: How can the alliance secure its northern flank, protect critical infrastructure, and ensure freedom of navigation in an environment where adversaries are increasingly active and the climate imposes unique constraints?

Against this backdrop, uncrewed systems or drones stand out as both a challenge and an opportunity. They have proven their value in recent conflicts, offering cost-effective ways to extend reach, enhance situational awareness, and conduct multiple mission sets. Yet their deployment in the Arctic and High North raises unique challenges: extreme cold temperatures and weather conditions that test endurance and maneuverability, vast distances that strain communications and sustainment, and growing geopolitical competition that complicates deployment.

Both Russia and China are investing in their own uncrewed capabilities and defensive countermeasures and are strengthening and expanding their presence in the Arctic, exploiting surveillance and security gaps. As such, those allies face mounting pressure to adapt — making it urgent to translate the rapidly advancing integration of uncrewed systems from experimentation into operational practice. Drones offer both a vital tool for deterrence and defense, and a test case for how innovation can be translated into practical capability at scale.

This report seeks to contribute to the policy and expert debate on Arctic security and operations by analyzing the role that uncrewed systems can play in enhancing allied defense and deterrence in the region. Its purpose is threefold:

1. Strategic framing — to contextualize NATO’s High North as a strategic region in great-power competition.
2. Operational analysis — to explore how uncrewed systems can support intelligence, logistics, combat, and crisis-response missions in a uniquely austere environment.
3. Policy and operational recommendations — to identify priorities for NATO, the US, and allies in bridging capability gaps and strengthening deterrence.

By combining strategic assessment with operational analysis and concrete recommendations, the report aims to bridge the literature gap on the future of military operations in the High North and provide actionable insights for allied planners and policymakers tasked with shaping defense and deterrence posture in the region. For the purposes of this analysis, the terms “High North” and “Northern Flank” are used interchangeably to denote the portion of the strategic Arctic area encompassing the North Atlantic and regions within and close to but south of the Arctic Circle, including the territories of Canada, the United States, Iceland, Denmark (via Greenland), Norway, Sweden, and Finland, consistent with NATO’s use of the term High North. The “Arctic” and “Arctic region” are used to reflect all land and ocean in the polar region, including territories of Russia.

Research Question and Thesis

The central research question guiding this report is: How can NATO and its Arctic allies leverage uncrewed systems to strengthen deterrence and defense in the High North, while addressing the region’s unique environmental, operational, and strategic challenges?

The report’s hypothesis is that while drones are neither a panacea nor a full-fledged replacement for traditional capabilities, they represent indispensable assets and force multipliers for both NATO collectively and allies individually in the High North, provided that integration and sustainment challenges, capability gaps, and innovation bottlenecks are addressed with urgency.

Methodology

The report draws on a qualitative methodological approach combining open-source research, open-source satellite imagery, expert and practitioner consultations, applied exercises, and data analysis. Sources include academic literature, policy papers, military doctrine, and defense industry insights. Crucially, the analysis also benefits from three complementary streams of fieldwork and stakeholder engagements:

• Semi-structured interviews with industry, military, policy makers, and practitioners.
• Strategic scenario exercise: a scenario-based simulation conducted with subject-matter experts to test how uncrewed systems might be employed in an Arctic crisis scenario, followed by an expert survey.
• Delegation trip (Denmark and Norway): a fact-finding mission engaging with military, government, and industry stakeholders.

Finally, by applying Braun and Clarke’s six-phase analytical framework, we conducted thematic analysis to distill recurring patterns, overarching themes, and key insights from the survey dataset.³ This method included data screening, initial coding, pattern identification, theme review and refinement, and the final synthesis of the thematic findings.

Key Findings

The Expanding Battlefield Role of Drones

• Uncrewed systems provide scalable, cost-effective ways to extend reach, boost lethality, and enhance domain awareness, giving planners better visibility on adversarial activities for faster decisions and creating more tactical dilemmas for adversaries, thus strengthening allied deterrence in the Arctic.
• Drones can contribute to every phase of the find, fix, track, target, engage, assess (F2T2EA) targeting cycle and create a multiplier effect for traditional capabilities in multidomain operations.
• Uncrewed systems can generate budget and operational cost savings across the board. However, the extent of their operational effectiveness is commensurate with the degree of integration across the Doctrine, Organization, Training, Materiel, Leadership and Education, Personnel, Facilities, and Interoperability (DOTMLPFI) spectrum to absorb and sustain growing robotization. For Arctic allies, the goal is to use drones to increase their military capacity and capabilities while minimizing the logistic burden and balancing the size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) of new vehicles.
• Procurement of Arctic-capable drones across NATO remains fragmented, slow, and risk-averse. Most allies treat Arctic-specific requirements as secondary modifications rather than purpose-built characteristics, resulting in limited NATO-certified Arctic-ready drones.

General Risks and Challenges Associated with UxS

• The hype surrounding drones risks generating hasty investments and operational blind spots due to overreliance on attritable vehicles that are rapidly outmatched by countermeasures and adversarial adaptation. Hence, allies must preserve traditional lethality and regard uncrewed systems as complementary assets to augment and enhance traditional capabilities in a high-low capability mix, rather than as full replacements.
• While decentralized grassroots innovation brings agility and competition (as seen in Ukraine), it also creates duplication and more volatile business models. As a result, the more heterogeneous the mix of uncrewed systems in use, the harder it is to achieve interoperability, economies of scale, and sustained long-term technological iteration.
• The move-countermove cycle surrounding segments of uncrewed/autonomous systems technology appears more compressed compared with other weapon systems due to a combination of factors, including:
  1. A software-centric and highly iterative nature.
  2. The widespread use of fast-evolving and easily accessible commercial technologies.
  3. The lower barriers to entry and experimentation.

The asymmetric advantage associated with this technology is likely short (i.e., measurable in months), although this doesn’t apply evenly to all uncrewed and autonomous systems.

Uncrewed Systems and Escalation Management in the Arctic

• Findings from the interviews and the strategic scenario exercise suggest a broad perception that uncrewed vehicles have a limited escalatory impact on current Arctic security dynamics.
• During interviews and the strategic scenario exercise, drones emerged as platforms of choice to increase domain awareness and early warning to provide rapid situation assessment in case of crisis.
• While limited, empirical evidence from major interstate drone shootdown incidents in the past two decades indicates that the use/loss of uncrewed systems did not lead to direct escalation.
• However, the constant evolution of drone technology and its operational roles significantly complicate the development of frameworks to measure or even define escalation in the context of autonomous systems use where human decision making is compressed or absent.
• As such, there currently is no shared understanding among governments and military planners of the effects of uncrewed systems employment on crisis and conflict escalation, which may also be influenced by differences in culture or regime type.

Photo credit: Matias Luge on Unsplash