Can an Interagency Task Force Work in the Arctic?

By Jeffrey Kucik and Veronica De Allende

An increasingly accessible Arctic raises questions about U.S. responsibilities in the region. There are two core challenges. First, Russia’s (re)militarization of its Arctic coastline, coupled with growing Chinese activity—often enabled by Moscow—signals rising geopolitical competition in the region. Second, the United States has an interest in preserving a rules-based order in the Arctic, including freedom of navigation, credible deterrence, and the peaceful resolution of territorial and resource claims.

These challenges spur debate. Not everyone agrees that Arctic threats merit significant attention. Others believe the region represents a new frontier of U.S. national security. What is clear, however, is that no single service—including the U.S. Coast Guard, which bears primary operational responsibility in the region—can manage the Arctic’s growing demands alone. Securing the Arctic requires more than additional icebreakers. It requires an integrated, whole-of-government approach that combines the Coast Guard’s operational experience with law enforcement, intelligence, domain awareness, logistics. It also requires allied coordination across vast distances and unforgiving conditions.

The solution may be a joint interagency task force—a Coast Guard-led structure that establishes command and control procedures for the pressing needs in the Arctic like greater maritime domain awareness, emergency response, and credible deterrence.

Fortunately, the Coast Guard doesn’t have to start from scratch. There are important lessons to be learned from farther south, where the Joint Interagency Task Force-South (JIATF-S), a Coast Guard-led effort to disrupt drugs smuggling, has become a textbook example of effective coordination across U.S. agencies and foreign partners.

The need for coordination in the Arctic

Receding sea ice is opening new shipping routes and exposing reserves of oil, gas, and minerals, driving geopolitical competition among Arctic and non-Arctic nations alike. This competition has increased militarization in the region, evidenced by recent Russian investments in nascent Arctic facilities and by more frequent naval exercises to assert control over strategic waterways and resources. At the same time, lack of clear governance frameworks—and mixed compliance with those frameworks—further complicates efforts to manage disputes, raising the risk of conflict over territorial claims and access rights.

The U.S. may not have the same equities in the region as Canada, Norway, or Russia. It also doesn’t have the same raw capabilities as some Arctic nations, with Russia’s icebreaker numbers towering over other countries. But taking a backseat to safeguarding the region would be a strategic mistake given U.S. interests. Outside of principled concerns over great power competition, there are several practical considerations. First, maintaining sea lines of communication (SLOCs), particularly around Alaska, is vital to ensuring freedom of navigation for commercial shipping and military logistics. Second, as a NATO member, the U.S. shares responsibility for protecting critical undersea infrastructure, including energy pipelines and communications cables, which have been the target of increased attacks in recent years. Third, a busier Arctic increases on the burden placed on the Coast Guard in terms of search and rescue operations, law enforcement efforts, and a wide variety of emergency response duties.

The Coast Guard cannot go it alone. Even with recent funding commitments, and investments in new ships, the service cannot meet the scale or complexity to confront tomorrow’s Arctic challenges. Coordination among U.S. agencies such as the Department of Defense (DoD) and the intelligence community is required to effectively address emerging military and civil threats. Looming challenges also require robust international cooperation to prevent escalation and ensure the Arctic remains safe and secure.

The Coast Guard has already taken important steps by establishing an internal Task Force-Arctic in late 2023 to assist with command and control across its two major regional commands and their nine districts. But Task Force-Arctic’s roles and responsibilities remain subject to debate, and there have been calls to transition to an “up-and-out” model aimed at coordination among U.S. government entities as well as partner nations.

Questions remain as to what, exactly, a task force’s mission ought to be and, related, which entities must be involved. What is clear, however, is that coordination and collaboration are needed. Outside of search and rescue operations, where there are formal protocols for emergency response, many of the threats emerging in the Arctic stress operational capabilities and experience. This created command and control headaches within the USCG—and it means coordination across the U.S. government and foreign partners is often ad hoc. A more formal, institutionalized set of contingency plans, communication lines, and coordination protocols can speed up crisis response and assist with allocating scarce resources across the region.

The U.S. has similar efforts in other domains, including the recently stood up JIATF-401 for counter-drone operations and JIATF-CC and JIATF-S for counter-narcotics operations. JIATF-S in particular has been a much-lauded example of how this kind of coordination can work.

JIATF-S as a blueprint for interagency fusion

Established in 1994 to fight transnational drug trafficking, JIATF-S integrates a wide range of US government stakeholders, including the Department of State, U.S. Navy, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and partner nations. The task force functions as a centralized intelligence fusion and coordination center, synthesizing information and personnel from disparate agencies into a cohesive operational structure. It also integrates foreign countries, drawing on the capabilities of foreign liaison officers from 20 partner countries spanning Latin America and Europe.

JIATF-S plays a central role in coordinating maritime patrols, aerial surveillance, and logistical support to enable effective counternarcotics operations across the Caribbean, Eastern Pacific, and Latin America. Its effectiveness derives in part from its capacity to rapidly disseminate time-sensitive intelligence and assign the most appropriate operational asset to specific operations.

Commentators point to several reasons for this success. First, the JIATF-S has a clearly defined mission—combat the drug trade—which keeps daily tasking focused on core objectives while also promoting buy-in across U.S. agencies and foreign partners. Second, the task force’s structure, procedures, and operating methods have evolved over several decades in response to first-hand experiences. JIATF-S has become more efficient over time due to built-in knowledge sharing and the accumulation of trust among operating partners, even as drug traffickers have adapted to maintain effective networks. Third, the task force has reportedly become a desirable career stop for personnel. Staff performance is assessed primarily on contributions to the task force’s core mission, rather than on their home agency. This has been said to boost morale while fostering a cooperative, team-oriented culture. Fourth, participation by foreign partners increases the resources and the geographic reach of the task force. Moreover, these partners have a long history of shared strategic interests and demonstrated interoperability, further strengthening collaborative operations.

While not an exhaustive list, these factors highlight why JIATF-S is widely regarded as a model of interagency coordination, multinational cooperation, and centralized operational effectiveness. Duplicating that success elsewhere, however, is not straightforward and may not be possible in the Arctic due to a number of structural reasons.

JIATF-S is a “coalition of the willing,” relying heavily on voluntary contributions from participating agencies and foreign partners and lacking the standard military authorities of a command. This structure demands relative alignment of interests among partners, both to provide resources and to collaborate in operations. Effective interagency and multinational coordination requires overcoming barriers to burden sharing, communication, and the integration of diverse operational cultures. These issues would likely be relevant for any interagency task force. However, unique challenges in the Arctic make a simple “copy and paste” of the JIAFT-S framework impossible. The most critical is the lack of a clear organizing mission of common concern around which an Arctic task force could organize.

Is the JIATF-S model transferable to the Arctic?

There are several factors to consider in a region so vast and complex. Each of these presents strategic, operational, and tactical challenges to US entities and their partners.

Mission Diversity. JIATF-S seeks to accomplish a narrowly defined (albeit difficult) mission: countering narcotics trafficking through detection, monitoring, and interdiction efforts. The operational tempo, while inherently demanding, is directed toward that singular priority. In contrast, evolving threats in the Arctic are more diverse. These threats include illegal fishing, freedom of navigation interruptions, and increased militarization. Addressing this wide range of issues would require more combined resources and authorities, making interagency coordination significantly more complex than in the JIATF-S environment. For example, a JIATF-Arctic may be compelled to reconcile national security imperatives with civil support requirements. That means the task force’s mandate would have to be broader than that currently held by JIATF-S.

The potential breadth of the mandate has operational implications. The diffusion of missions—e.g., covering both emergency response and threat detection—would likely complicate the initial buy-in from both interagency and international stakeholders, perhaps critically.

Geography and Climate. The Arctic region’s remoteness, ice-covered waters, and extreme weather conditions demand specialized capabilities. The USCG has the most relevant experience within the U.S. government operating in these extreme weather conditions, including navigating ice. As a result, the USCG would likely bear the heaviest burden in coordinating C2 and in executing operational threat response. And yet many other agencies have roles to play in the region. Intelligence community assets contribute to maritime domain awareness, including monitoring vessel traffic. Likewise, the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation may have law enforcement and investigatory responsibilities.

Yet those entities have fewer resources and less operational experience in the region. In fact, even including USCG assets, the Arctic is generally characterized by minimal infrastructure, high costs, and a pervasive absence of fixed Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) systems. As a result, unlike JIATF-S’s relatively narrower geographic focus, the Arctic’s size and harsh conditions strain resources and capabilities. On the one hand, the challenging conditions are precisely why interagency and international coordination are important. One the other hand, those conditions place limited on who has the experience and capability to participate in joint efforts.

Geopolitical Dynamics. JIATF-S activities have at least nominal buy-in from governments across the area of responsibility. In the Arctic, however, there are more pressing geopolitical tensions, implying that Arctic nations are less aligned in their interests and willingness to cooperate with one another. Russia’s military buildup and China’s self-declared status as a “near-Arctic state” complicate consensus. Militarization concerns, particularly related to air and missile defense assets, engender significant disagreements. Even among U.S. allies and Arctic Council members, interests are not always aligned. As a result, building and sustaining a coalition of foreign partners in an Arctic task force setting will be more fraught politically, with less overlap in shared goals, interests, and missions.

Experience. JIATF-S is the product of decades of trial, error, and adjustment. It started as a heavily siloed set of independent task force efforts that was combined and refined since the late 1980s into the well-oiled machine operating today. Similar efforts in the Arctic may be able to borrow some of that experience. However, the unique challenges, including geographic, geopolitical, and mission complexities imply that achieving similar effectiveness would likely require significant time, sustained investment, and persistent trust-building among partners. The deficiency of established, routine combined operations in the High North signifies that the foundational trust required for interagency personnel to execute rapid, mission-critical decisions is currently absent.

Moving Forward

These challenges do not necessarily preclude the establishment of a JIATF-S-like organization in the Arctic. Rather, they highlight some of the inherent difficulties replicating this model from one region to another with fundamentally different mission sets, geography, infrastructure, and operating conditions. Overcoming these challenges would require two foundational features.

First, an Arctic task force must be given a clear mandate from Washington that defines its mission set, assigns dedicated resources, and clarifies the boundaries of the command’s authority across U.S. agencies and allied partners. We’ve stressed here that, at a minimum, a JIATF-Arctic must facilitate coordination and cooperation across—and outside—U.S. entities with roles and responsibilities in the region. This means ensuring that intelligence-sharing and communications channels are formalized rather than ad hoc. It also means developing defined protocols for tomorrow’s contingencies.

However, the mission set remains an open question. One thing the U.S. must consider is which foreign partners to include. If the U.S. goal is balancing adversary influence in the region, then the mission set—and membership—of the task force may focus on allied interests. But there’s also a different approach, one that includes Russia (and potentially China) to institutionalize cooperation around shared vulnerabilities in the region. That model would better approximate the Arctic Council’s structure, but could go beyond the Council’s core initiatives, which focus largely on environmental concerns.

Second, it should adopt decision-making and organizational structures that promote learning, flexibility, and adaptation, much as JIATF-S did through decades of trial and error. This would require fostering an organizational culture that incentivizes cross-agency collaboration and implements the use of embedded rotational staff to cultivate long-term personal and institutional trust. Together, these two features, when fully actualized, would provide the foundational elements for an effective joint interagency C2 model in the Arctic—enabling coordination among U.S. agencies and multinational partners, even amid the region’s extreme conditions and complex security dynamics.

Looking forward, such a task force could complement existing Arctic security structures like the Arctic Council, NORAD, and NATO, by providing a persistent, integrated U.S.-led framework for managing emerging threats, sharing intelligence, and synchronizing interagency and multinational C2 across air, land, and maritime domains. Ultimately, the question is not whether an Arctic task force could work, but whether the United States can afford to approach the region without one.

Jeffrey Kucik, Ph.D., is a Research Scientist at the Center for Naval Analyses and a Global Fellow at the Wahba Initiative for Strategic Competition at New York University.

Veronica De Allende, Ph.D., is a Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Naval Analyses.

The views expressed are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the opinions of CNA, the U.S. Coast Guard, the Department of Homeland Security, or the U.S. government.

Featured Image: The Coast Guard Cutter Stratton from Alameda, Calif., steams near an ice floe in the Arctic Ocean during Operation Arctic Shield 2014 Sept. 14, 2014. (Coast Guard photo courtesy of Cutter Statton)