ICEX 2022 is a three-week train designed to analysis, take a look at and consider operational capabilities within the Arctic area.
“The Arctic area may be unforgiving and difficult like no different place on Earth,” mentioned Rear Adm. Richard Seif, commander of the Navy’s Undersea Warfighting Growth Middle in Groton, Connecticut, and the rating officer of ICEX 2022. “It’s additionally altering and changing into extra lively with maritime exercise. ICEX 2022 offers the Navy a possibility to extend functionality and readiness on this distinctive atmosphere, and to proceed establishing greatest practices we are able to share with companions and allies who share the U.S.’s purpose of a free and peaceable Arctic.”
The Arctic is experiencing a pattern of diminishing sea ice extent and thickness creating the chance of elevated maritime exercise within the area, together with trans-oceanic transport and useful resource extraction.
The Navy’s Arctic Submarine Laboratory (ASL), based mostly in San Diego, serves because the lead group for coordinating, planning and executing the train involving representatives from 4 nations and greater than 200 members over the 5 weeks of operations.
Along with the U.S. Navy, Army, Air Drive, Marine Corps and Coast Guard personnel who’re collaborating within the train, personnel from the Royal Canadian Air Drive, Royal Canadian Navy and United Kingdom Royal Navy are collaborating.
U.S. Marine Corps Capt. Dave Swensen is main a workforce of six from the Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Middle to help in ICEX 2022.
“Any alternatives we are able to get to offer our personnel entry to expertise in excessive chilly circumstances might be drive multipliers to our establishment and finally to the Marine Corps,” mentioned Swensen, who added that 5 of the middle’s personnel participating in ICEX are instructors on the Bridgeport, California, chilly climate middle for excellence. “We are going to come again among the many most chilly weather-experienced personnel on the base.”
A short lived ice camp is being established on a sheet of ice within the Arctic Ocean, often called an ice floe, to help testing submarine methods and different arctic analysis initiatives.
The camp, named Ice Camp Queenfish, will function a short lived command middle for conducting operations and analysis within the Arctic area. The camp consists of shelters, a command middle, and infrastructure to securely home and help greater than 60 personnel at anyone time.
“At Ice Camp Queenfish, our groups can take a look at gear in a really harsh and demanding atmosphere,” mentioned Howard Reese, director of the Arctic Submarine Laboratory. “It’s essential that each one the expertise we’re testing can carry out in the entire oceans of the world, together with the Arctic. Right here, we are able to study what works properly within the Arctic and what doesn’t work as properly, and we are able to make modifications and enhancements.”
The camp will get its namesake from USS Queenfish (SSN 651), the primary Sturgeon-class submarine to function below ice and the fourth submarine to succeed in the North Pole when it surfaced there on Aug. 6, 1970.
Submarines have carried out under-ice operations within the Arctic areas in help of inter-fleet transit, coaching, cooperative allied engagements and operations for greater than 60 years. USS Nautilus (SSN 571) made the primary transit in 1958. USS Skate (SSN 578) was the primary U.S. submarine to floor via arctic ice on the North Pole in March, 1959.
Since these occasions, the U.S. Submarine Drive has accomplished 97 Ice Workouts – ICEX 2022 is the 98th – the final being carried out in 2020.
“An enormous a part of that is constructing on the submarine neighborhood’s historical past, going again to the Nineteen Forties, working within the Arctic,” mentioned Lt. Mike Reid, an train vary security officer, supporting ICEX from the Navy’s Norfolk, Virginia,-based Operational Check and Analysis Drive. “This demonstrates that we not solely haven’t misplaced that talent set, however we’re all the time studying, bettering and constructing upon the teachings we’ve discovered over the many years. ICEX 2022 is an thrilling alternative for the junior personnel to participate in that historical past and stick with it that custom.”
For extra details about ICEX 2022, go to www.navy.mil or www.fb.com/SUBLANT and www.fb.com/SUBPAC.
