“Cold Response”: NATO’s war games in the Arctic

 

By Piero Messina

Cold Response 2022 will be the largest exercise born since the eighties and takes place within the Arctic Circle. The exercises take place every two years. But Cold Response 2022 tastes different. About 35,000 soldiers from 28 nations will participate in this year’s maneuvers, which will run between mid-March and early April, but above all, for the first time since the Cold War, two Carrier Strike Groups will be present. The first headed by the US aircraft carrier USS Harry Truman and the second led by the British aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales.

The Royal Navy’s all-new aircraft carrier is the second of the Queen Elizabeth class and can operate fixed-wing aircraft represented by F-35B fighters and helicopters, including the Ah-64 Apache attack aircraft, with which the British Armed Forces have started training for the first time at the Bardufoss air station, Norway, in 2019.  

The Italian Navy also participates in the war games. The aircraft carrier Garibaldi of the Navy passed Gibraltar towards the Atlantic Ocean on 21 February. The Italian aircraft carrier is expected in front of the Norwegian coasts where it will participate with other aircraft carriers. Garibaldi will be the command unit of the Amphibious Forces during the last phase of the exercise.

According to NATO sources, the deployment of forces is not directly linked to the current tense situation between NATO and Russia, caused by the special military operation in Ukraine.

 

It is not possible, however, to exclude “a priori” that the conflict in Eastern Europe could very easily extend to the Baltic states. The Kola Peninsula is home to major Russian military bases – including Murmansk/Polyarny – and features some of Moscow’s most powerful state-of-the-art weapon systems, including hyper-sonic cruise missiles. In the course of 2021 Russia carried out twelve Zircon missile launches (10 from frigates and 2 from submarines) all from Arctic seas, in a show of strength that underlines how the Arctic represents a region that Moscow considers vital.

The new weapon now appears ready to enter service in the Northern Fleet on Admiral Gorshkov-class frigates and fourth-generation multi-role submarines.

If launched from the Russian sector of the Barents Sea, the Zircon missiles could reach targets in the Norwegian Sea in about 10 or 15 minutes. These systems are also highly flexible being able to be launched by surface and submarine units, from mobile land launch systems, and soon from airplanes. Together with the S-400 and S-500 air defense systems installed in that area they could challenge NATO forces for control of the seas of Norway and Greenland.