An exercise in the Barents Sea signals that big-power rivalry covers every ocean
is not a hospitable place for visitors. “Frequent snow storms…blotted out the land for hours on end,” wrote an unlucky British submariner sent there to snoop around during the cold war. “We faced the beastliness of spray which turned to ice even before it struck our faces.” American and British warships have not exercised there since the 1980s—until they returned last week.
On May 1st a flotilla of two American destroyers, a nuclear submarine, a support ship and a long-range maritime-patrol aircraft, plus a British frigate, practised their sub-hunting skills in the Norwegian Sea. That is not out of the ordinary;has been rediscovering its cold-war interest in the Arctic in recent years. In 2018, for instance, an American aircraft-carrier sallied into the Arctic Circle for the first time in 30 years, during a huge exercise in Norway.
But on May 4th some of those ships broke off and sailed farther north into the Barents Sea, along with a third destroyer, remaining there untilDay on May 8th. Russia’s navy, whose powerful Northern Fleet is based at Severomorsk around the corner, was told in advance, but still greeted its visitors with live torpedo exercises.
The decision to dispatch destroyers was a bold one. One aim was to show that covid-19 has not blunted swords, despite the virus knocking out an American and a French carrier. Another was to assert freedom of navigation in the face of Russia’s imposition of rules on the Northern Sea Route , a passage between the Barents Sea and the Pacific Ocean that is increasingly navigable as ice melts. Although last week’s exercise did not enter theMore broadly, the Arctic is a growing factor indefence plans.
The main task of Russian subs is defensive: to protect a “bastion”, the area in the Barents Sea and Sea of Okhotsk where its own nuclear-armed ballistic-missile submarines patrol. Butadmirals worry that, in a conflict, some might pose a wider threat to the alliance. A separate Russian naval force known as the Main Directorate of Deep-Sea Research could also target the thicket of undersea cables that cross the Atlantic.
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