Alaska at the Frontier: Thoughts from the 2026 Alaska Defense Forum

BLUF

Alaska is seeing a surge of attention from the U.S. government and military as its strategic location is once again proving critical for national security. From an expanded missile defense program to concentrations of homeland-based fifth-generation fighters, advanced early warning systems to increased Arctic and Pacific maritime assets, critical minerals to space launch and communications, activity in the American Arctic is reaching new levels not seen since the Cold War. Central to all of this is technology, and Alaska serves as a testing and application zone for frontier technologies - the logistical challenges, complex climate, and dispersed population all provide real-life testing grounds for new and unique solutions to long-standing and emerging challenges.

I recently returned from the Alaska Defense Forum 2026 in Fairbanks, Alaska. For those familiar with the strategic significance of Alaska, or its challenging climate and geography, the surprise is not the renewed attention to the 49th state, but that renewed attention has come so late, and with such little cohesive focus. Nearly a century ago, Brig. Gen. Billy Mitchell infamously told Congress "Alaska is the most central place in the world for aircraft, and that is true either of Europe, Asia, or North America,” adding that “in the future, whoever controls Alaska controls the world. I think it is the most strategic place in the world.” Mitchell’s observation is even more relevant today than it was in the lead up to World War II. Russia and even China regularly probes the airspace around Alaska, ship traffic in the Arctic is on the rise, and the shortest and most logical flight path for ballistic missiles from U.S. overseas adversaries passes over the Arctic.

Anchorage, home to Joint Base Elmendorf–Richardson (JBER), is 500 miles closer to Moscow than is Washington D.C., and 3000 miles closer to Tokyo and Beijing. Adak, in the Aleutian Islands, home to a reviving U.S. Naval Air facility, sits at a point of a triangle with Honolulu and Tokyo, less than 2500 miles to each. Between JBER and Eielson Air Force Base outside Fairbanks, Alaska hosts the largest concentration of fifth generation fighters anywhere in the world, both F-22s and F-35s. In 2025, Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport ranked first in the United States for air cargo, third in the world. 2025 saw a record number of ships operating in the Arctic globally, a 40% increase since 2013. There were 103 full transits of the Northern Sea Route (NSR) in 2025, each passing through the Bering Sea. In 2026, China launched its first regularly scheduled Polar container route. Activity in and around Alaska is growing, and that has strategic implications. That Alaska is important no longer seems to be in question. The challenge is whether the United States can shape a coherent Arctic strategy and focus efforts among the service branches and between the government, military, and private sector.

A Moment of Opportunity

This was my first time attending the Alaska Defense Forum, and I found its focus on the tactical application and connection between the military and local communities refreshing. While its primary focus was local, the forum helped highlight just how much federal attention is turning toward Alaska. The Air Force has designated Alaska its most critical modernization theater. Significant investment has been allocated to the Golden Dome layered missile defense architecture, which reaches from Fort Greely, home to the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense Interceptors, through Clear Space Force Station, and down to the space facilities in Kodiak, as well as significant radar and early warning systems. The Port of Nome is being dredged to 40 feet to become the first U.S. deep-water Arctic port. The Coast Guard is getting new ice-class ships, to be based in Alaska, and the Navy is revitalizing Adak.

The challenge, however, is not attention - it is coordination and consistency. ADF showed a familiar pattern: senior officials arrive from the lower 48 for the first time, claim to finally recognize the logistic challenges of Alaska (distances, climate, cost, layered command authorities, the gap between what civilian infrastructure can support and what military operations require), and pledge to go back and reshape how they will prioritize and act. But they are likely to rotate out, typically within 18 to 24 months, leaving their successors to “discover” Alaska again. The "uniqueness" of the Alaska operating environment is not new information. It should be institutional knowledge by now. What gets lost in the transitions, then, is not just knowledge of the challenges, it is the awareness necessary to connect multiple initiatives into something coherent, something that can be communicated, and acted upon locally.

Energy resilience, transportation infrastructure, unmanned systems, domain awareness, housing and labor for an expanded military workforce, telecommunications, nuclear power — each has its own program office, its own timeline, its own Washington sponsor. Individually, each is defensible. Collectively, without a designated authority and a clear priority order, they risk becoming an expensive collection of partial solutions rather than a foundation for sustained forward presence. That is the structural challenge the forum surfaced clearly, if not always directly.

Dual-Use Investment

Alaska is two and a half times larger than Texas, with a total population smaller than Austin. Many communities are completely off any rail or road grids, and seasonal barges are often the primary means of resupply. Roughly 44 percent of communities lack adequate broadband. Energy costs in remote areas run three to five times the national average. Construction costs are 2-10 times that of the lower 48. These realities shape two related dynamics: First, the small population and high costs mean that Alaskan projects often fail to attract private capital or government interest - how does one justify a massive spend on such a small population? The second, though, is that the rural challenges are the same constraints that limit military logistics, communications, and operational resilience.

Combining civil and military priorities offers economy of scale, and may begin to overcome the financing barrier. The Small Modular Nuclear Reactor (SMR) that will soon be tested at Eielson Air Force Base may pave the way for future energy developments in a state still heavily dependent upon fuel oil for power. Free-space optical communications and LEO satellites can serve as secondary secure communications channels for the military and help bring broadband to the more than 170 unserved Alaskan communities. Port expansions to support Navy access also support commercial fishing, freight, and the communities that depend on maritime supply. Enhanced Use Leasing arrangements at military bases, which allow private developers to build housing, energy, and communications infrastructure in exchange for in-kind services, are beginning to unlock investment that appropriations alone could not. Shy of crisis-driven spending (it took World War II to finally “justify” the money needed to build the ALCAN Highway, and finally connect Alaska to the continental United States, though there is still no rail connection) a dual-use framework is the realistic financing model for a state with large infrastructure needs and limited funding.

The Technology Opportunity

What often gets lost in the strategic conversation is that Alaska is already functioning as one of the United States' most active laboratories for defense-relevant and dual-use technology. The University of Alaska Fairbanks hosts the Alaska Center for UAS Integration, one of only seven FAA-designated UAS test sites in the nation. The Pan-Pacific UAS Test Range Complex extends that capacity further. The 11th Airborne Division at Fort Wainwright has carried out several extensive tests of unmanned systems, including complex operations and electro-magnetic warfare simulations, all under real-life harsh Arctic weather conditions, putting equipment to tests not possible in controlled laboratories or even in the lower 48. These exercises put technologies through their paces: cold degrades batteries, icing affects antennas, data links destabilize in frozen conditions, and maintaining operations in drone-dense electromagnetic environments is doubly challenging.

The technology frontier extends in every direction. New air traffic management systems being evaluated in Alaska must do something no continental environment yet requires at operational scale: coordinate commercial aviation (both heavy and light), military aircraft, and autonomous systems simultaneously across shared airspace in weather and terrain that stress every design assumption. Cold-weather rechargeable battery programs are advancing under conditions that cannot be faked elsewhere. The Air Force is designating land at Alaskan installations for data centers through Enhanced Use Leasing, with the idea of persistent forward computing for persistent forward presence. High-latitude navigation, counter-UAS doctrine, distributed energy systems, and Arctic telecommunications infrastructure are all areas where Alaska is the only American test environment with the scale of space and variety of conditions.

The technology opportunity is real and it is now. The question the forum left open — and the question that matters — is whether the attention, the investment, and the initiatives can be organized around a coherent enough framework that the efforts are combined and prioritized in ways that truly matter, rather than simply coexisting. Alaska has been important for a long time. The current attention may once again wane. Alaska represents both a key operating environment for national security, and one where the limits of new technologies can be tested under some of the harshest conditions in the world.

 Additional author contributions from Ethan Burk