How to fight in the brutal cold

Soldiers with the US Army’s 11th Airborne Division filing through the snow and ice before boarding a Chinook helicopter during night exercises. — Kenny Holston/The New York Times

THE soldiers heaved the 135kg plastic sleds down the hallway of their headquarters building.

Packed inside were the things they would need to survive when the temperature at their Alaska training area plunged to “40 below zero or colder”.

Each sled carried a tent with enough room for 10 soldiers if they curled their legs.

There were gasoline containers to fuel a small metal stove that would keep them warm. There were shovels to clear the snow and hammers, stakes and rope to keep their tents standing when the winds howled.

There were also fire extinguishers in case the whole thing caught ablaze.

In Washington and other capitals around the world, the Arctic is cast as a new frontier for military competition, a region where rising temperatures are opening new sea lanes and creating new access to valuable rare earth minerals.

Pentagon strategy papers have repeatedly called for closer cooperation with Arctic allies and the construction of new bases to ward off rivals.

US Army Specialist James Alvarado gets into position during a night mission at the Yukon Training Centre in Alaska. — Kenny Holston/The New York Times

US President Donald Trump has expressed his interest in more atavistic terms, vowing to buy or, if necessary, conquer Greenland by force.

Absent from all of the strategy documents and Oval Office threats is any sense of how US troops might fight in the brutal conditions.

In February, the conflict with Iran was looming and tens of thousands of US troops were gathering in the Middle East. But in Alaska, the Army was preparing for a new kind of war.

The setting was the Yukon Training Centre, a 640km expanse of snow and ice near Fairbanks and the Arctic Circle.

At -40°C and below, weapons fail, batteries quickly lose their charge and fuel turns into a viscous jelly.

Army officials wanted to learn how their equipment would perform in the extreme cold.

But their biggest questions were about the soldiers who came from places like Alabama, Texas, Florida and California. How far could these troops go before exhaustion set in and they started to lose focus, make mistakes or simply quit?

About 4,000 soldiers from the US Army’s 11th Airborne Division, including 107 from the division’s Able Company, were taking part in the training battle, which pitted two similarly sized forces against each other.

In this fight, the ammunition was fake; blanks and lasers replaced bullets and artillery shells. But the cold was unsparingly real.

Capt Trung Duon Vo, 35, had been in command of Able Company for almost a year, enough time to understand the dangers his soldiers faced from frostbite.

The coldest nights, he knew, could take fingers and toes. If soldiers got sloppy, it could cost them their lives.

Into the fight

The Able Company soldiers said they often felt as if they were participants in a “big experiment”.

Col Brawley (centre), briefing soldiers before night operations at the Yukon Training Centre near Fairbanks, Alaska. — Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Some of the soldiers had volunteered to serve in Alaska, in search of adventure or because the Army had offered them a cash bonus. Others were there purely by chance.

The troops climbed off buses and spent the next several hours searching for their rucksacks and other equipment in the dark.

The soldiers knew they were at higher risk for frostbite and other weather-related injuries when they were not moving. So, they flapped their arms and stomped their feet to keep their blood flowing.

Capt Vo expected that his company’s lead element – about two dozen troops from its first platoon – would push across the frozen river and march about 5km through knee-deep snow with their tents and equipment.

Around 2am Capt Vo’s lieutenant and first sergeant quietly approached. The 10-day exercise had barely begun and some of the troops already looked miserable.

The lieutenant and first sergeant suggested that they modify the plan and cut the first platoon’s movement that night down to 1.5km.

Capt Vo’s normally upbeat demeanour shifted quickly to disgust.

“It’s Day 1 and you already sound like you’re tired,” he shouted. A string of profanities followed, along with a shared understanding that the first platoon soldiers were going to march the full distance as planned.

By 2.24am the soldiers had strapped their snowshoes to their boots. Bent under the weight of their 27kg rucksacks, they made their way across the frozen river.

They arrived at their objective just as the sun was rising and started digging out a clearing in the snow to put up their tents.

A Swedish-made arctic vehicle, which can carry a dozen soldiers, swiftly travels through deep snow during military exercises. — Kenny Holston/The New York Times

After about 30 minutes of shovelling in search of solid permafrost, they realised that they were digging in frozen muskeg, a deep bog common in the Alaska wilderness.

Instead of looking for a better spot, they decided to temporarily lay out their sleeping bags in the open snow.

They squeezed each other’s fingertips and earlobes, a regular check to ensure that blood was still flowing through their capillaries and they were not at risk for frostbite.

After a couple of hours in their cold bags, they resumed their search for solid ground.

Capt Vo arrived just as they were scraping the permafrost and staking their tents.

“You look demoralised,” he told 1st Lt Jordan Lofgren, the platoon leader.

“That was an ass kick,” replied Lt Lofgren, 26. “Without some rest we can’t move the way we just did.”

The platoon had about six hours before they would have to head out again.

The endless march

Senior leaders knew that their front-line troops cared about two things more than anything else.

“They want to know when they are going to get warm, and they want to know when they are going to eat their next hot meal,” said Col Christopher Brawley, who oversaw about 2,700 troops, including Capt Vo’s Able Company.

Col Brawley built his strategy around this harsh reality. If he could cut off the enemy’s access to food and fuel, Col Brawley believed that he could rapidly break their will to fight.

The Able Company troops were part of a big force moving to cut off the enemy’s northern supply routes.

A smaller force, made up of several hundred Canadian soldiers, was pushing across more than 16km of heavy snow and muskeg to close off the harder-to-reach southern routes.

“The Canadians have a horrifying task,” Brawley said.

But they also had some advantages. They had three times as many snowmobiles as the US battalions in the Arctic. Their soldiers were accustomed to operating in the extreme cold.

The days blurred together. The troops longed for the moment when they would sneak up on the enemy and test their soldier skills in a simulated firefight.

But actual gunbattles were few and far between. Most days, they simply marched.

A big question that hung over the entire Arctic training exercise, now in its fifth year, was whether the US Army could really fight a war this way.

One problem was the warm tents, which stood out in the extreme cold and could be easily spotted by drones carrying thermal sensors.

A few days into the training centre battle, Capt Vo launched a surveillance drone and – using its thermal sensor – quickly found an enemy platoon in its tents.

He then sent out a second killer drone carrying a mock explosive. The opposition soldiers heard its whirring engine and tried to scramble out of their tents to safety. But it was too late.

The judges overseeing the exercise concluded that Capt Vo had killed most of the enemy platoon.

“What would happen if drones took out a string of American tents?” Capt Vo said.

How would the American people react? How would he?

By the ninth day of the exercise, the US and Canadian troops under Col Brawley’s command had cut the opposition’s supply lines. They were running low on fuel.

“You have the enemy in checkmate,” one of the officers overseeing the exercise texted him.

For the Able Company soldiers, though, the combat never felt as real as the cold. — ©2026 The New York Times Company

This article originally appeared in The New York Times