Scenario By: Jake "Kommissar" Keyes
Date: August 18th 2025
Location: Chukchi Sea
Playable Sides: NATO
Duration: 3 Days
For 80 years, the U.S. and Russia have faced off over the familiar future battlefields of Western Europe. Popular imagination has been captivated by visions of violence on the fields of Fulda or in the GIUK gap. But as the Cold War has thawed, so too has the Arctic ice. Today, American and Russian troops face off not between Berlins but over maritime boundaries in the Arctic Ocean, battle lines drawn not by a wall but by the nebulous declarations of international law.
Yet too many politicians remain fixated on Europe, aging minds drawn as if by inertia to yesterday's war. U.S. troops in West Berlin were backed by the might of NATO, but the men in the Arctic are often left to make do with a few decrepit platforms, all the worse for a harsh environment that demands the best of those who brave it. As of 2023, the United States had only three icebreakers, the newest over twenty years old; two are nearly fifty and threaten soon to break themselves. Mechanical issues run rampant throughout the fleet. Their replacement - hardly enough to plug the growing gap - is mired in delays and cost overruns; Congress is itself frozen; the Navy seems uninterested in what it calls a "Coast Guard problem."
Russia, by contrast, has been investing in a large and capable icebreaking fleet, and can call on land-based air to help enforce its maritime claims. China has broken icy ground on its own Arctic vessels. Joint Sino-Russian patrols have become increasingly common: the prospect of freezing the U.S. out of a crucial region is tempting to a Russia ruined in Ukraine and a China chafing under American pressure.
In 2025, long grown numb to this dangerous discrepancy, the aging U.S. icebreakers rendezvous with their Canadian counterpart and embark on an audacious, first-of-its-kind FONOP in the Northern Sea Route. U.S.-Russian relations remain bottomed out, and America hopes to remind the Russians that international law applies as surely in the Arctic as it does in Ukraine.
Tempers are hot. But it is a cold and snowy day...
Description by Ethan Hermanson