Snow Blind and Crazy
In Virginia this morning it's snowing and icing. The temperatures are in the teens and predicted to peak in the low 20s. It's kind of miserable, although nothing like Minneapolis and Saint Paul, where it's in the minus 20s, and snowing. And ICE is killing Americans in the streets. I haven't written much about that. There are excellent accounts on social media and in credible news outlets concerning the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, accounts I can't add to.
In my past, as a Navy Hospital Corpsman, I was stationed with Marines at their Mountain Warfare Training Center on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, near Bridgeport, California. We trained Marines to survive and fight in extreme cold, in deep snow, in meadows at 9,000 feet above sea level, to above 12,000 feet. It was a defining experience for me.
A few months before I retired for good, I paid a couple of official visits to Kazakhstan, in December and again in early April. Astana, the capital, sits at 1,300 feet above sea level on the open steppes of Central Asia. It records some of the lowest winter temperatures imaginable. The night before we flew in, in December, we were told the temperature plummeted to -68 Celsius, although I suspect that was an error—or it incorporated wind chill factor—as it would equal -90 degrees Fahrenheit. At any rate, temperatures had warmed to the -30s Celsius (-22F) when we arrived at 3 am. On the flight in I suppressed mental images of contorted bodies of Wehrmacht soldiers frozen in ice and snow before Stalingrad. Still, I felt prepared and ready for the cold. I had the right clothes and boots and I had lived and worked and trained in cold approaching what I anticipated on the Kazakh steppes.
And I was wrong. The cold was mind numbing and the brief exposure I experienced on that first trip—shuttling to and from vehicles and short walks to shops and restaurants—was physically and mentally draining. Physically because your body expends copious energy to stay warm. Mentally, because you tend to think about what you'll do to survive if the vehicle you're being driven in should be in an accident or break down. Or in one instance, if the driver of a gypsy cab one of your colleagues flagged down in a dodgy part of town—complete with a broken out driver's window covered with a plastic garbage bag and lacking an ignition key—kicks you out in a dodgier part of town far from your hotel.1
Anyway, this weekend's storm and the news from Minnesota, and recent White House blustering and bawling about sending troops to Greenland has me thinking about the kind of friction that only extreme cold can deliver.2
Friction, in the military operations sense, is a rather more elegant expression of a reality all too familiar to troops, otherwise referred to as shit happens. And trust me, if we ever land troops in opposed operations in Greenland, shit will happen in so, so, many ways.
With apologies to the Brownings, let me count the ways.
Everything breaks. The equipment we used when training Marines in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the late 1970s was nowhere close to the technically sophisticated and complicated equipment used by the Army and Marines today. Yet our stuff failed frequently in sub-zero temperatures for which it wasn’t designed. Metal fatigue and subsequent fractures, also an issue with wheeled and tracked vehicles, as well as rotary wing equipment, is exacerbated in extreme cold.
Everything is just harder to do. An rule of thumb we used at Mountain Warfare Training Center was everything is three-times harder in the cold. Except, “three times” understates the difficulty faced, particularly for untrained or under-trained troops. I found the simple act of sleeping in an expedient shelter (tent, lean-to, snow trench on the windward side of a snow drift) required a sort of choreography. I learned to stow all my stuff either in or near my sleeping bag so I could get to it easily. When getting out of my sleeping bag and shelter—be it to answer a call of nature or at first light—I had to mentally checked through every step I was going to take: getting my clothes on, getting my boots on, getting into my coat and gloves, and so forth. It may sound a little OCD, and maybe it was. But it worked, and was mentally challenging, just to not freeze.
Newbies always overdress. This may seem counterintuitive, but was one of the bigger problems we saw with trainees. They would wear every article of clothing they were issued, all at the same time, regardless of what they were doing. If they were marching of setting up a camp—the kind of stuff infantry does—their clothes would get sweat sodden. When they stopped exerting themselves, the damp clothes would freeze, right along with the wearer. The rubric was: warm into the least amount of clothes needed to wear, and add or remove layers as needed. Similarly, troops would often climb into their sleeping bags fully clothed, which usually meant they’d crawl out in the morning with damp, sweaty clothes in freezing temperatures.
Water, water, water. Its axiomatic that troops never drink enough water, Ask any medic, corpsman, or platoon sergeant. In extreme cold, something like 70 percent of your body’s moisture is lost to exhalation. Yet because of the cold you often don’t feel thirsty. Delivering safe potable water is a logistical challenge and troops are often left to rely on water from rivers, streams, ponds, or snow-melt, all of which require treatment to make the water safe for consumption. Images of crystal clear mountain streams belie the fact that beaver and other critters defecate in the water and are reservoirs for water-borne parasites and pathogens. Chlorine and iodine tablets added to water that is near freezing temperature is rendered effectively inert by the temperature, requiring added time to work, sometimes warming your canteen inside your parka to get the disinfectant working, actions that don’t work well with impatient troops. See Table.
Hypothermia. Hypothermia is a potentially lethal condition that occurs when your body sheds heat faster than it produces heat. Hypothermia can occur at temperatures as high as 50 to 60 degrees Fahrenheit if you’re wet, exhausted, or suffer prolonged exposure, factors consistent with infantry (particularly) operating in cold climates.
Mild hypothermia occurs when the body temperature drops to 90 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit (32-35°C) and is characterized by shivering, agitation, and confusion.
Moderate hypothermia occurs when the body temperature drops to 82 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit (28-32°C), and is characterized by violent shivering that stops as the internal temperature falls, and increased agitation and confusion.
Severe hypothermia occurs when the body temperature drops below 82 degrees Fahrenheit (28°C) and is characterized by loss of consciousness, weak thready pulse, and death.
As the signs of mild and moderate hypothermia are behavioral (confusion, agitation) they should be observable to engaged leaders and medical personnel. They are also conditions that you don’t want occurring in people performing demanding and potentially dangerous physical tasks, such as those done by infantry particularly) operating in cold climates.
Training, even good training, does not equal lived experience. Going back to the premise of this essay: Why would anyone be insane enough to elect to attack Greenland. Leave aside the geo-political consequences of rupturing NATO and giving Vladimir Putin an early Christmas present for the ages, it is a barking mad idea for the simple reason that well trained troops on the offense in a harsh environment they aren’t native to, are at a disadvantage against people who live there who are on the defense. The Wehrmacht units who swept into Russia in the summer of 1941 were highly trained and their blitzkrieg took them to the suburbs of Moscow, when they ran into Napoleon’s old nemesis, General Winter. Bogged down by snow and extreme cold, their offense fell apart and German troops became fodder for Russian partisans in their rear who knew how to live and fight in the Russian winter.
I have to think that the military calculus of attacking Greenland—along with the political and economic implications of, effectively, going to war with NATO—are behind Trump’s announcement that he won’t “use force” to take Greenland, followed by stating he still wants it, which doesn’t put Denmark or NATO at ease. These are after all, the grandchildren of people who remember all too well another autocrat who abjured force against his neighbors in 1938.
We’ll be fortunate if this mad dream of Trump’s (and some of his backers’) ends without bloodshed and contorted bodies of American soldiers frozen in the snow and ice. Still, Trump and his helpers have insulted and angered nations who have been our allies and friends for 80 years and longer. It does us no good. It does Europe and NATO no good. It does, doubtless, delight the enemies of democracy and self-determination in Moscow, Beijing, and other capitals where freedom is a mirage or a thing to sneer at.
Table - The Science Behind Cold Water and Disinfectants (courtesy of Claude by Anthropic
Fortunately the driver didnt kick us out, or worse. He delivered us to our destination, albeit after getting lost in unfamiliar sections of the city for an hour. He did earn a tip for his troubles.
Here I am using friction as Carl von Clausewitz used it, not as our self-designated “Secretary of War” might imagine it used.