JSOU Quick Look
ArcticNEXT: Compound Security Threats in
Strategic Competition
IMPORTANT DEPARTMENT OF
DEFENSE DATES IN ALASKAN
HISTORY
1867
Alaska purchase
1867-1877
Alaska occupied and adminis-
tered by U.S. Army
1877-1897
Withdrawal of U.S. Army, de
facto civil rule by U.S. Navy and
U.S. Internal Revenue Service
1884
Alaska’s first civilian governor
1897-1920
Return of U.S. Army to provide
law and order during Gold Rush
1920-1940
Decline of military presence and
recognition of Alaska’s strategic
importance
1939
Fort Wainwright established
1940
Elmendorf Air Force Base
established
1940
Fort Richardson established
1940-1945
Buildup of forces/World War II
1942
Alaska Territorial Guard (a.k.a.
“Eskimo Scouts”) organized
1945-1990
Cold War defense of Alaska,
Arctic training, and humanitari-
an services
What is ArcticNEXT?
ArcticNEXT is a collaborative eort designed to provide the Nation with the best
available approaches for compound security threats in strategic competition and is set
in a priority defense region. It is part of a Joint Special Operations University (JSOU)
full-spectrum doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education,
personnel, facilities, and policy (DOTMLPF-P)
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program serving the United States
Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) enterprise working across joint, inter-
agency, intergovernmental, multinational, and commercial (JIIM-C) partnerships in
service to the Joint Force. ArcticNEXT spans research and analysis (R&A), teaching
and learning (T&L), and service and outreach (S&O) activities, bringing together
partners from across the interagency, academia, NATO,
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and the Services together
to tackle preparedness, operational, intelligence, and emergent technological chal-
lenges in the High North. It is generating collaborative solutions that are transferable
elsewhere in the world while emphasizing the rst Special Operations Forces (SOF)
Truth, “Humans are more important than hardware.”
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Preamble
e Department of Defense (DOD) and USSOCOM lack a cohesive and adaptive
Arctic narrative focused on the operational needs of the DOD in a world challenged
by compound security threats in strategic competition and climate change. e de-
velopment of an operational and SOF-peculiar set of requirements and strategies will
help USSOCOM acquire appropriate technologies and inform force preparedness,
modernization, and planning through improved resilience and adaptation. Arctic-
NEXT is not geography bound; instead, the region provides an unparalleled test bed
from which lessons learned can be applied to other austere and extreme environ-
ments globally. ArcticNEXT focuses on the roles of SOF by articulating what is need-
ed to move past historic discourse
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and tactics that may be maladaptive to defense
supremacy.
e Arctic region provides an unparalleled setting to understand the elements and
dynamics of compound security threats in strategic competition as it relates to evolv-
ing denitions and applications of irregular warfare (IW) and unconventional war-
fare (UW).
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It is also a region that incurs high operations costs and where titles and
authorities relevant to shared defense and security are underutilized. Contributing to
the ambiguity of DOD approaches to the Arctic are the lack of rigorous and applied
integration of the social and physical sciences and poorly dened requirements for
data and technology needs for the SOF enterprise.
While academic and nongovernmental organization Arctic narratives have a long
history, they have remained relatively homogeneous and can be grouped into ve
general categories:
