Arctic Today
NATO scrambles for drones that can survive the Arctic
By Reuters January 30, 2025
COPENHAGEN (Reuters) In 2023, Mads Petersen, owner of Greenland-based startup Arctic Unmanned, sat in a car to keep warm while he tested a small drone at minus 43 degrees Celsius (minus 45 degrees Fahrenheit).
The cold soon drained the drone's power.
"The battery only lasted for three minutes," he said.
Governments in the world's far north are seeking to overcome such challenges as the region comes increasingly into the geopolitical spotlight.
Russia and China have stepped up military activity in the Arctic, while NATO states in the region are reporting more acts of sabotage on energy and communications lines. President Donald Trump has recently revived U.S. claims to Greenland.
The conflict in Ukraine, meanwhile, has shown that unmanned aircraft can provide critical intelligence and strike capabilities on the battlefield.
The United States, which sees the Arctic as crucial for territorial defence and its early warning system against nuclear attacks, said in a July strategy do ent it would focus on unmanned technology to counter Chinese-Russian collaboration there. Russian and Chinese bomber planes flew together off the coast of Alaska in July and their coast guard ships sailed together through the Bering Strait in October.
But drones whether multicopters or fixed wing models are vulnerable. Only the largest, long-range models have enough power for anti-icing systems like those used by aircraft. Cold, fog, rain or snow can cause a malfunction or crash.
With countries boosting military spending, a Reuters survey of 14 companies and six defence ministries and armed forces in northern Europe and America shows the industry working at pace to buy or develop drones that can endure icy conditions, and increasing urgency among NATO states to acquire them.
"We are all having to catch up with Ukraine and Russia," said General Major Lars Lervik, head of the Norwegian Army.
No global data is publicly available on states' military drone fleets, but Lervik said the war in Ukraine has given Moscow and Kyiv valuable experience of drone technology that NATO countries lack.
Russia, whose military began building up a drone fleet in the Arctic in 2014, took an early lead in the race to control the Northern Sea Route, a passage between Europe and Asia along Russia's northern coast, said James Patton Rogers, a drone expert at Cornell University and a UN and NATO policy adviser....