Second of two parts
FORT GREELY, Alaska — Jumping from a warm aircraft into subzero temperatures created a unique problem for the 10th Special Forces Group’s military free-fall team.
Equipment failed during previous attempts, as the drastic temperature change — from a heated cabin to more than 35 degrees below zero at 13,000 feet — wreaked havoc on parachute systems and electronics. What the members of the elite Army unit learned over the next week would force them to rewrite assumptions about what is actually possible in such frigid weather.
The experiment was part of a broader challenge confronting the U.S. military in the North. The Arctic is no longer viewed as strategically secondary, as melting sea ice opens new lanes for maritime travel and Russia and China look to deploy forces and control parts of the region.
Russia’s buildup in the theater has spanned decades. Moscow has modernized its Northern Fleet, built nuclear-powered icebreakers and deployed forces trained to fight and live in conditions that have devastated militaries throughout history.
SPECIAL COVERAGE: Arctic Notebook
During the same exercise in which conventional forces grappled with their own equipment issues, an Operational Detachment Alpha from the 10th Special Forces Group, better known as Green Berets, conducted operations deep into the “enemy territory” in support of those forces. The experience pushed up against some of the foundational advantages of special operations forces in the U.S. military.
The team started its preparations months before ever setting foot on Alaskan snow, remaining undetected as it traveled to support the larger force at the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Training Center.
Over months, the Operational Detachment Alpha closed the gap among tactics, technology and the sheer physics challenging team members to succeed and simply survive.
The Washington Times was invited to embed with the Operational Detachment Alpha and witness firsthand the challenges of operating in one of the planet’s most inhospitable environments and the solutions the unit discovered while doing so.
Staying warm and staying alive
Maj. Scott Ratzer, a company commander with the 10th Special Forces Group, put it plainly: Military free fall is an insertion technique that lets small teams slip into denied and contested environments where conventional air assets can’t go. It works only if the equipment can handle the transition from altitude to extreme cold without failing.
The team had already been hard at work to solve the problem.
“Our military free-fall team, they’ve been training for this for about 10 months now, specifically building up to this,” Maj. Ratzer said. “They were jumping skis into the Mojave Desert a few months ago, in November.”
One of the main challenges for the Operational Detachment Alpha was to develop methods for not only jumping into the extreme cold but also figuring out how to bring along all the additional equipment needed. Maj. Ratzer said that simply jumping with skis was initially seen as a dangerous and failure-prone operation.
The next challenge was thermal shock. Problems stemming from the drastic temperature swings during a high-altitude, low-opening jump, known as HALO, in the extreme cold hadn’t been solved. Previous jumps had equipment faults, which could be the difference between life and death to an operator carrying a full suite of equipment.
“They tried out some new equipment, some new techniques, and they had a wildly successful experimentation jump,” Maj. Ratzer said.
The team leader, known as “Sam” and whose full name The Times is withholding for security reasons, said his team worked through the physics of the problem.
The team from Colorado tried something counterintuitive. Rather than keeping warm in the aircraft, they elected to use only individual gear to stay warm by wearing heated gloves and masks, betting that solving the physics problem would crack the code on Arctic insertion. Chilling the aircraft and gear as they went higher resulted in a gradual cooling effect that allowed equipment to stay cold and effective after jumping.
“To be honest, it wasn’t terrible,” Sam said. “We layered up. A lot of guys, I think, overheated because we wanted to be on the extreme side of comfort rather than be flying through the air and be frozen.”
The successful jump and the lessons learned will be shared with the Special Forces regiment across the Army.
Locked in a case of ice
Getting to the ground was just step one.
The Operational Detachment Alpha’s military free-fall skill is much more than just a fun way to kick off a training exercise. The operation’s intent was to employ those troops in areas beyond where the rest of the conventional force would be.
Col. Kyle Spade, the 11th Airborne Division’s operations lead, described it as an essential task for the division, necessary to find intelligence and conduct missions against critical enemy targets.
“What we need to understand is how to put those elements deep into the division area of operations,” Col. Spade said in an interview. “It takes time. How long can they stay there? How long can we support them out in that location? That, I think, is critical to success.”
Sustaining soldiers is a constant consideration at these temperatures.
“Water is one of the heaviest things to transport,” said Neil Shea, an author and Arctic explorer. “You’re not going to be bringing a ton of it with you. … That requires that you spend some manpower to be constantly melting water.”
Troops in the Operational Detachment Alpha were burning camp stoves to melt water, or creating water by melting ice, almost constantly whenever they stopped moving. Soldiers would rotate through who was responsible, just to get some time warming fingers and toes. The process itself was difficult. The extreme cold dried out the air. It left the snow powdery and hard to compact. Melting the ice to make water took time.
“This environment is an environment where you’re not only battling an enemy who’s trying to find you but the environmentals and the weather that are also trying to kill you,” said Sam, emphasizing that, along with trying to melt water to stay hydrated, just eating enough calories could become difficult.
“You burn a lot, shivering and trying to keep your body warm. So you need to take more in, which is really hard,” he said.
Troops who would normally find low cover and watch for any potential enemies couldn’t stay too still for long. Cold would settle in, risking their fingers and toes, or hypothermia.
“You come out fresh and excited and guys have a higher expectation of how far we can move because you’re at 100%,” Maj. Ratzer said. “I think gradually as the days continue on, you dwindle not only just from movement but lack of sleep, lack of hydration and lack of food. … You see a pretty exponential drop in performance, cognitive function.”
The team would set up a concealed camp each day, using Hilleberg tents meant for Arctic and high-altitude exploration. Twelve people would sleep in each tent. As each day wore on, the tents would become less and less effective at being a slightly warmer but dry place to sleep. The moisture from the soldiers’ breath would freeze on the inside walls while snow collected on the outside, effectively locking the living area in a case of ice.
“The first couple days we were able to be moving on skis, which I think really helped keep people’s bodies naturally warmer until the end of the day when guys can get in their sleeping bags,” Sam said.
After conducting a linkup that provided them with snowmobiles, that dynamic changed. The team could move faster and cover more ground, but it meant that staying warm was now a task in and of itself, not part of their usual movements.
“It’s definitely making movement and caloric exertion easier over longer durations moving throughout this terrain,” Sam said. “But it kind of forces us to be a little bit more static.”
In both cases, the team is hauling all its gear, still prepared to engage in combat. Heavy sleds get rucksacks down onto the snow, carrying food, fuel, tents, communications equipment and other supplies.
“We’re dragging some pretty heavy, robust, plastic sleds,” Sam said.
Unlike in the past three decades, much of the action isn’t happening at night. That’s too risky.
The danger of night
The U.S. military, and specifically special operations forces, has come to “own the night” with advanced night vision and thermal sights. Yet the Operational Detachment Alpha and its adjacent teams found that in the extreme cold of the Arctic, that may not be the most effective tactic.
“The overhead thermal threat at night has shifted our philosophy,” Maj. Ratzer said. “So in the past, where we’ve owned the night, superior night vision, now we’ve come to realize that probably one of the more dangerous things to a detachment is overhead thermal, especially at night.”
The lesson is a combination of seeing new technology in Ukraine on both sides of the conflict and realizing what that looks like in this Arctic environment. Any warm body, whether it is a soldier or a snow machine, “stands out like sore thumbs,” Sam said. Snowshoe and ski tracks look warmer under thermal imaging, essentially drawing a line straight to a soldier’s position.
“Moving at night is … something that you want to try to mitigate as much as you can,” he said. “Because [thermal drones] will quickly find you, fix you and ultimately finish you from an enemy standpoint.”
The team took to covering larger movements during the day, trying to take advantage of normal camouflage methods while drones were more likely to be using regular cameras for scouting.
It provided a benefit for survivability. Temperatures 20 degrees below zero would dip another 20 or even 30 degrees at night. Being deliberate about digging into a position and using visual and thermal camouflage allowed troops to focus on simply surviving the night with their teammates.
It also would give them a chance to check on their equipment.
The communications challenge
Arctic conditions challenge the operating temperatures of more than just military free-fall equipment. Once in the environment, batteries — especially smaller ones used in optics, night vision, thermal devices and some communications equipment — become much less reliable.
Resupply is another risky operation that could highlight the position of the team, so powering communications becomes critical.
“We started off thinking that sustainment was going to feed communication, and we’ve come to learn that actually the communication feeds the sustainment,” Maj. Ratzer said. “Understanding what they need and staying two, three, four days ahead of them to resupply what they need, especially batteries.”
All that communication is discreet, ensuring minimal opportunity for the enemy to see a signal coming in and out of a remote area.
“I’ve been communicating essentially a tweet, 160-character message,” Maj. Ratzer told The Times. He said short bursts let his troops stay hidden. “Communication is a balance of the threat of detection versus the need for fidelity and bandwidth.”
Technological challenges don’t extend just to the newest proprietary systems. Sam said even the fairly standard rifles his team was using were being kept dry, without any weapon oil, because it would freeze and turn into a gummy substance that would jam the gun.
“Everyone wants to use new tech, but new tech tends to fail at extreme temperatures,” Mr. Shea said. He described spending time with the Canadian Rangers, a unit of local people in the far north of Canada who conduct presence patrols above the Arctic Circle.
“The Inuit preferred the bolt actions because they didn’t freeze up,” Mr. Shea said. “You could leave the bolt action out, cover it with a tarp, but leave it outside the tent overnight, and you pick it up in the morning, it would work.”
He pointed out that, until recently, that bolt-action rifle was usually a genuine World War II-era Lee-Enfield that was only recently replaced by a more modern bolt action by the Canadian government.
Communities with more experience at a cultural level with the extreme cold were simply better adapted to it. A Norwegian unit, also conducting deep reconnaissance for the conventional force, self-supported for 10 days.
“Took all their supplies with them and were able to sustain themselves,” Col. Spade said. “We received fantastic reports back from them. They had the field craft and the tradecraft to be able to provide those things.”
As the 11th Airborne Division puts more resources and effort into developing drone capabilities in the high north, Col. Spade found that the information provided by human teams was invaluable.
“There’s nothing like having an individual on the ground able to provide real-time feedback on operations,” he said of the Norwegian partner unit and the Operational Detachment Alpha teams. “As we look to the future, we need to leverage small [drones] and other collection platforms, but the ability to have somebody on the ground that can move over the snow is going to be critical.”
Maj. Ratzer said the elite U.S. teams can get in anywhere, regardless of how difficult the environment, and accomplish their mission.
“Strategic reconnaissance comes down to our specialties,” he said. “It’s reconnaissance that happens in inherently hard-to-get-to areas — denied, deep, politically sensitive or strategically important. That is where Green Berets come into play.”
• John T. Seward can be reached at jseward@washingtontimes.com.
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