Changes in the Arctic: Background and Issues for Congress

Ronald O'Rourke, Coordinator
Specialist in Naval Affairs

The diminishment of Arctic sea ice has led to increased human activities in the Arctic, and has heightened interest in, and concerns about, the region’s future. The United States, by virtue of Alaska, is an Arctic country and has substantial interests in the region. On January 12, 2009, the George W. Bush Administration released a presidential directive, called National Security Presidential Directive 66/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 25 (NSPD 66/HSPD 25), establishing a new U.S. policy for the Arctic region.

Record low extents of Arctic sea ice over the past decade have focused scientific and policy attention on links to global climate change and projected ice-free seasons in the Arctic within decades. These changes have potential consequences for weather in the United States, access to mineral and biological resources in the Arctic, the economies and cultures of peoples in the region, and national security.

The five Arctic coastal states—the United States, Canada, Russia, Norway, and Denmark (of which Greenland is a territory)—are in the process of preparing Arctic territorial claims for submission to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf. The Russian claim to the enormous underwater Lomonosov Ridge, if accepted, would reportedly grant Russia nearly onehalf of the Arctic area. There are also four other unresolved Arctic territorial disputes.

The diminishment of Arctic ice could lead in coming years to increased commercial shipping on two trans-Arctic sea routes—the Northern Sea Route and the Northwest Passage. Current international guidelines for ships operating in Arctic waters are being updated.

Changes to the Arctic brought about by warming temperatures will likely allow more exploration for oil, gas, and minerals. Warming that causes permafrost to melt could pose challenges to onshore exploration activities. Increased oil and gas exploration and tourism (cruise ships) in the Arctic increase the risk of pollution in the region. Cleaning up oil spills in ice-covered waters will be more difficult than in other areas, primarily because effective strategies have yet to be developed.

Large commercial fisheries exist in the Arctic. The United States is currently meeting with other countries regarding the management of Arctic fish stocks. Changes in the Arctic could affect threatened and endangered species. Under the Endangered Species Act, the polar bear was listed as threatened on May 15, 2008. Arctic climate change is also expected to affect the economies, health, and cultures of Arctic indigenous peoples.

Two of the Coast Guard’s three polar icebreakers—Polar Star and Polar Sea—have exceeded their intended 30-year service lives, and Polar Sea is not operational. The possibility of increased sea traffic through Arctic waters raises an issue concerning Arctic search and rescue capabilities. On May 12, 2011, representatives from the member states of the Arctic Council signed an agreement on cooperation on aeronautical and maritime search and rescue in the Arctic.

The Arctic has increasingly become a subject of discussion among political leaders of the nations in the region. Although there is significant international cooperation on Arctic issues, the Arctic is also increasingly being viewed by some observers as a potential emerging security issue. In varying degrees, the Arctic coastal states have indicated a willingness to establish and maintain a military presence in the high north. U.S. military forces, particularly the Navy and Coast Guard, have begun to pay more attention to the region.


Date of Report: March 28, 2013
Number of Pages: 96
Order Number: R41153
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Navy Ohio Replacement (SSBN[X]) Ballistic Missile Submarine Program: Background and Issues for Congress

Ronald O'Rourke
Specialist in Naval Affairs

The Navy’s proposed FY2013 budget requests $564.9 million for continued research and development work on the Ohio replacement program (ORP), a program to design and build a new class of 12 ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) to replace the Navy’s current force of 14 Ohioclass SSBNs. The Ohio replacement program is also known as the SSBN(X) program.

Under the Navy’s FY2012 budget, the first Ohio replacement boat was scheduled to be procured in FY2019, and Ohio replacement boats were to enter service on a schedule that would maintain the Navy’s SSBN force at 12 boats. The Navy’s proposed FY2013 budget defers the procurement of the first Ohio replacement boat by two years, to FY2021. As a result of this deferment, the Navy’s SSBN force will drop to 11 or 10 boats for the period FY2029-FY2041.

The Navy in 2011 estimated the average procurement cost of boats 2 through 12 in the Ohio replacement program at $5.6 billion each in FY2010 dollars, and is working to reduce that figure to a target of $4.9 billion each in FY2010 dollars. Even with this cost-reduction effort, observers are concerned about the impact the Ohio replacement program will have on the Navy’s ability to procure other types of ships at desired rates in the 2020s and early 2030s.

Potential oversight issues for Congress for the Ohio replacement program include the following:

• the reasons for deferring the start of SSBN(X) procurement by two years, to FY2021, the cost and operational impact of this decision, and whether it would be feasible and cost effective to restore the start of procurement to FY2019, as planned under the FY2012 budget; 
• the plan to design the SSBN(X) with 16 SLBM tubes rather than 20; 
• the likelihood that the Navy will be able to reduce the average procurement cost of boats 2-12 in the program to the target figure of $4.9 billion each in FY2010 dollars; 
• the accuracy of the Navy’s estimate of the procurement cost of each SSBN(X); 
• the prospective affordability of the Ohio replacement program and its potential impact on funding available for other Navy shipbuilding programs; and 
• the question of which shipyard or shipyards will build SSBN(X)s. 

This report focuses on the Ohio replacement program as a Navy shipbuilding program. CRS Report RL33640, U.S. Strategic Nuclear Forces: Background, Developments, and Issues, by Amy F. Woolf, discusses the SSBN(X) as an element of future U.S. strategic nuclear forces in the context of strategic nuclear arms control agreements.


Date of Report: March 27, 2013
Number of Pages: 45
Order Number: R41129
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Navy Nuclear Aircraft Carrier (CVN) Homeporting at Mayport: Background and Issues for Congress

Ronald O'Rourke
Specialist in Naval Affairs

The Navy’s proposed FY2013 budget defers the Navy’s plan to homeport a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier (CVN) at Mayport, FL. The Navy’s proposed FY2013 budget and the FY2013- FY2017 Future Years Defense Plan (FYDP) contain no funding for Military Construction (MilCon) projects required to homeport a CVN at Mayport. The Navy states: “Although the FY 2013 budget does not contain a construction project supporting the homeporting of a CVN in Mayport, FL, the Department [of the Navy] is committed to the requirement and policy to strategically disperse CVNs on each coast. This is a deferral at this time due to fiscal constraints.”

The Navy’s Atlantic Fleet CVNs are all homeported at Norfolk, VA. The Navy wants to establish a second Atlantic Fleet CVN home port by homeporting a CVN at Mayport. Prior to the submission of the FY2013 budget, Navy plans called for having Mayport ready to homeport a CVN in 2019. Transferring a CVN from Norfolk to Mayport would shift from Norfolk to Mayport the local economic activity associated with homeporting a CVN, which some sources estimate as being worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

The Navy’s desire to homeport a CVN at Mayport is an issue of strong interest to certain Members of Congress from Florida and Virginia. Certain Members of Congress from Florida have expressed support for the Navy’s desire to homeport a CVN at Mayport, arguing (as have DOD and the Navy) that the benefits in terms of mitigating risks to the Navy’s Atlantic Fleet CVNs are worth the costs associated with moving a CVN to Mayport. Certain Members of Congress from Virginia have expressed skepticism regarding, or opposition to, the Navy’s desire to homeport a CVN at Mayport, arguing that the benefits in terms of mitigating risks to the Navy’s Atlantic Fleet CVNs are questionable or uncertain, and that the funding needed to implement the proposal could achieve greater benefits if it were spent on other Navy priorities.


Date of Report: March 27, 2013
Number of Pages: 75
Order Number: R40248
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Kings and Vikings

Since the early 1990s an important literature on the causes and intensity of conflict has emerged. Initiated by seminal work of Hirshleifer (1991, 1995) and Grossman (1991), several analysts have considered how rational agents allocate their endowments across productive and appropriative activities to maximize their payoffs. Since conflict, in various forms, has played a major role throughout human history – shaping the development trajectory of civilization – improving our understanding of the nature of conflict appears extremely useful.   A slightly awkward feature of the conflict literature is its focus on static modeling. While, arguably, there are examples where opponents contest a prize during one instant and return to their usual business, there are many other cases where the nature of conflict evolves over time. Conflicts may evolve because technologies and relative prices change due to some endogenous or exogenous process, or because the incentives to behave in a certain fashion are subject to change. In this book we adopt the latter perspective, and discuss the incentives for agents to agglomerate into larger groups. Agglomeration may enable parties to better defend themselves from aggressors, or to better exploit their weaker neighbors. The result is what can be called a theory of competitive agglomeration.   Our approach was motivated by the insight that dealing with issues of provision of defense and exploitation of neighbors was one of the primary reasons for governments and larger political groups to form in the first place. In this way, our theory contributes to the literature on the optimal size of political jurisdictions, providing an alternative angle to explain the development of nation states. Like these theories, scale economies are at the heart of our story, and optimal nation size is determined by balancing benefits and costs of increasing the jurisdiction. Unlike other theories, however, our dynamic theory of agglomeration springs directly from the nature of the conflict technology, and not from an assumption about fixed costs in the provision of certain public goods. In fact, we show that the degree of agglomeration – a measure of the optimal size of a jurisdiction – depends upon the technology by which defenders and invaders interact. In essence we aim to provide a natural link between two strands of literature – analytical work on the size of nations and on arms races

While we hope our theory is useful in understanding the basic forces driving agglomeration in the face of conflict in a general setting, we shall discuss our theory in terms of a particularly dramatic episode in history: the era of the Viking invasions. The Viking invasions are an interesting and in many ways ideal episode within which to study agglomeration: only through effectively forming larger groups could European settlements deal with Viking raids, while at the same time Viking invasions evolved over time from small, disorganized attacks into large, organized invasions. Our theory also allows us to consider various hypotheses as to how the invasions got started in the first place. In this paper we focus on these early days and on the development towards the high of the Viking invasions. While we don’t analyze explicitly the end of the Viking era, the model can be used to shed some light on this matter as well.

The book is organized as follows. In section II we provide a short history of the Vikings, fleshing out some of the more pertinent stylized facts and honing in on some of the gruesome details. Section III introduces notation and sketches the bare bones of the basic model. In section IV we consider the relatively easy case where villages can ‘agglomerate’ in coalitions to improve their oomph in contests, but where the level of their contribution to the coalition is fixed. In section V we allow villages to optimally choose their contribution. This allows u to trace out the full dynamic system, and analyze its properties.


Date of Report: April 1, 2013
Number of Pages: 29
Order Number: G1318
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African Americans and the United States Military

In an era where Barack Obama serves as the Commander-in-Chief and the military is one of the most racially integrated institutions in American society, it is worth considering as one reads Defiance that things were not always so. The two epigraphs of this essay serve as bookends to the history of African Americans in relation to American patriotism and the nation’s armed forces from the Revolution through the Vietnam era. Phyllis Wheatley, the literate slave of a prominent Boston family, offered poetic support for American grievances against the colonial regime of taxation using her own actual state of enslavement as a way of proving her right to protest against a fiscal regime that many Bostonians and others referred to as metaphorical slavery. This condition of being both a patriot and, in many cases, at best a second-class citizen marks the experience of many African Americans in uniform until the integration of US armed forces under President Truman. The quotation from Private Allen Jones serves as a reminder that even after integration and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, life in an officially colorblind military (or country, for that matter) did not and does not guarantee equable treatment before the law, whether that law is civil or the Uniform Code of Military Justice.


Date of Report: March 21, 2013
Number of Pages: 18
Order Number: G1317
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