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The Finnish Defense Forces sent out an urgent message: We are being invaded. We need help.
Hundreds of American troops — part of a new Arctic division — boarded planes in Fairbanks, Alaska. Their flight curved over the North Pole and landed at Rovaniemi Airport, in northern Finland. The soldiers quickly unpacked their M-4 assault rifles, rocket tubes and belt-fed machine guns and deployed to the quiet snowbound forests, dressed in Arctic whites and vaporproof boots.
This was all just a drill, launched in mid-February. But the scenario is believed to be increasingly possible. As climate change melts ice across the Arctic, this part of the world, once so remote and forgotten, is becoming more accessible and more contested. The world’s major militaries — American, Russian, Chinese and European — are all training for a winter war.
“It’s really only been the past five or six years that everybody’s moved on from the global war on terror,” said Robert McBride, a Canadian brigadier general helping oversee the war game.
“Arctic nations are starting to understand the strategic importance,” he said. “The Arctic now has come to pre-eminence.”
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