Deep in Norwegian woods, some 400 kilometers away from the Russian border, an officer of the Norwegian Long Range Reconnaissance Squadron is hidden in a snow-made shelter, with only his light-grey firearm peeking out.

The officer, nicknamed Poster Boy, is part of the country’s elite Arctic task force, designed to operate far behind enemy lines to conduct surveillance missions. The snow cave serving as his concealment is known as a quinzhee, 1.5m high and 2m wide, built by piling snow together and allowing it to sinter, or harden, a task force specialty.

“It’s a constant evolution of what works and what doesn’t for us – what worked four years ago might not work today due to all the technology developments of equipment designed to catch us, some years ago a tent and camouflage could’ve been sufficient but not anymore,” the officer, who spoke anonymously because of the sensitivity around the unit, told Defense News.

Training here alongside the Norwegian soldiers were several other nations’ elite unit, including U.K. Royal Marines and soldiers of the Canadian Special Operations Forces Command. Royal Marines told Defense News that, given the speed of modern combat, units that want to stay invisible often have to move every 15 minutes to avoid detection.

Besides hiding from enemy drones, the Norwegian reconnaissance soldiers carry their own unmanned craft to spy on adversaries.

The unit is experimenting with different types of winterized surveillance drones, including the American-made Skydio and first-person-view models, to provide eyes in the sky and enable operations from greater distances on the battlefield.

Poster Boy said those systems will be increasingly relevant, especially in the event of a potential conflict with Russia, where the battle space would consist of vast stretches of icy land.

The Norwegian Army chief, Maj. Gen. Lars Lervik, told Defense News that drones were playing an important role in NATO’s largest Arctic exercise, Cold Response 2026, organized across Norway from March 9-19. He noted that aside from surveillance-type ones, forces are also testing attack drones and several unmanned ground robots in ground-to-ground and air-to-ground roles.

The name of the game for the quinzhee connaisseurs is silence and invisibility, two objectives that are increasingly hard to achieve, as seen in the war in Ukraine, where troops and equipment remain perpetually vulnerable to being located.

One way to mitigate these risks is to focus on tracking avoidance in snow, which relies on minimizing a soldier’s visual, thermal or electronic signatures. The Norwegian Defense Materiel Agency announced last month that recent trials in Denmark confirmed the effectiveness of the Swedish-made Mobile Camouflage System. Developed by Saab, the cloak is intended to greatly reduce detectability by limiting visual, thermal and radar signatures, including in Arctic conditions.

However, amid new technologies, the Norwegian top-tier Arctic unit continues to return to proven basics: using natural camouflage, such as snow, as its best bet for staying hidden.

“Using snow is our absolute best concealment – we move in darkness, foggy conditions, snow falls, where our tracks can be rapidly filled and hard to follow, and in good weather we stay static and concealed,” the officer explained.

Roughly 240 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, two soldiers — part of the Norwegian Armed Forces’ long-range reconnaissance unit — were imperceptible from their position deep in the woods during NATO’s Cold Response 2026 exercise.

One of the only clues of their presence was a small, grey, first-person-view drone lying on the snow — a stark contrast to their all-white uniforms. The drone in question is an American system, the Skydio X10D, which is also used by Ukrainian forces.

The U.S. manufacturer was awarded a $9.4 million contract by the Norwegian Ministry of Defense in July.

“We are trying our best in Norway to implement lessons from Ukraine — for us, it’s all about increasingly using FPV and intelligence-gathering ones but adapting them to our environment,” said a Norwegian officer who spoke anonymously because of the sensitivity around the unit.

The Norwegian officer told Defense News during the NATO exercise, which lasts from March 9 to 19, that there is also an interest in incorporating FPVs into high-value target operations. While some operators have begun simulator training to fly them, this is a fairly recent development and has not yet been formally incorporated into their training.

Another drone model was displayed by the Norwegian Army Land Warfare Centre, which is responsible for training and developing weapon systems, including testing drones and sensors.

An officer with the Land Warfare Centre who flies the Skydio explained that, as part of Cold Response, almost every unit of the Norwegian Army was equipped with this capability to rehearse intelligence-gathering maneuvers. So far, it has performed relatively well, but it has experienced some difficulties, like most drones, in harsh conditions found in the Norwegian Arctic, he said.

One of the key challenges is battery life, which degrades significantly in cold environments.

An additional FPV used by the Norwegians during the exercise was a self-built one, with cheaply procured parts. It served as a one-way attack drone whose purpose was to carry explosives and see how far it could fly.

Another Arctic nation to have brought along an experimental drone was the United States.

The U.S. Marines tested a unique-looking FPV provided by Johns Hopkins University. The variant was equipped with a cage, the purpose of which is to prevent an excessive loss of the systems during training. The cage prevents it from crashing, and if repairs are needed, they can be carried out easily.

The U.S. troops used it in force-on-force scenarios, in which a friendly force engages a live adversary. This type of training allows their operators to enhance their piloting skills in a strike manner while also improving their counter-drone tactics, increasing pilots’ survivability.

Similar to the Norwegians, Master Sgt. Patrick Harrington, director of the unmanned systems center of excellence at the 2nd Marine Division, highlighted power as one of the biggest challenges to operating FPVs in Arctic conditions.

“We’ve been able to exchange with our allies here also, there’s interest in how each country [ourselves included] uses them, what they fly, how they fly it,” he said.

Figures published by Gulf defense ministries indicate that as of March 3, Iran has launched more than 540 missiles and carried out over 1,450 drone strikes against regional countries, with drones constituting roughly three-quarters of the attacks, Reuters reported.

While the patterns seen since the start of the Iranian attack window resemble the saturation logic observed in Ukraine, where large waves of cheap one-way attack drones combined with ballistic missiles are deployed to overwhelm defensive systems, analysts note some differences in their roles.

“In Ukraine, Shahed-type drones often serve as nightly, persistent harassment and infrastructure attrition tools, whereas in the Gulf they’re being used inside a broader missile campaign intended to stretch the Gulf and U.S.-aligned air defenses across multiple states, bases and urban areas simultaneously,” Kristian Patrick Alexander, senior fellow and lead researcher at the UAE-based Rabdan Academy, said.

Thus far, Gulf countries have reported high interception rates of missile attacks, and to a lesser extent, against low-flying drones. For example, data published March 4 by the United Arab Emirates, which has absorbed a large number of the offensives, claimed military forces detected 941 drones and intercepted 876 of them.

Some of the weaponry used by countries and their allies to shoot down low-cost drones includes the U.S.-made Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) systems as well as Rafale fighters, F-15s and Eurofighters.

Francesco Schiavi, research fellow at the Middle East Institute Switzerland, concurs that one of the main challenges for the region will be endurance, especially as the fighting continues.

“Each interception carries a financial and logistical cost – estimates suggest that for every dollar Iran spends producing drones, Gulf states may spend $20-$28 on defensive fire, with individual interceptors often costing more than $1 million,” Schiavi added.

Both experts advised that countries under attack must urgently look to cheaper and scalable counter-drone layers: electronic warfare, jammers, guns or close-in weapons, directed energy, and enhanced shared air picture coordination.

“The ‘winning’ defense will be the one that can kill lots of targets cheaply without burning premium interceptors – without cheaper layers and better integration, the cost curve favors the attacker,” Alexander said.

Meanwhile, Tehran’s offensive arsenal, already degraded by U.S. and Israeli air strikes, is also running lower, said Federico Borsari, non-resident fellow at the Washington-based Center for European Policy Analysis

What to watch

As hostilities drag on, subject experts highlight three important factors to monitor: the type of attacks, the nature of targets, and the performance of strike weapons.

According to Alexander, one tactic to watch is whether Tehran will continue to send attack drones in big waves or if they will be used in sequenced packages to probe radars before firing missiles.

Schiavi adds that it will be important to pay attention to the strike pattern Tehran adopts: Until now, the regime has followed a dispersed approach, targeting several Gulf countries at once with a mix of weapons, but it could shift toward true saturation attacks as observed in Ukraine.

The primary targets of Iranian attacks have so far been military bases and embassies. It remains to be seen if Tehran is able to expand the target set to include more critical infrastructure, such as ports, logistic hubs, or energy facilities, which experts say would signal an escalation.

Sam Bendett, advisor at the Center for Naval Analyses, said he’s keeping close tabs on the flight ranges of Iran’s Shahed drones, and the variety of similar weapons the country has in its arsenal.

It will also be important to see if Washington’s role changes as the conflict continues, considering that Gulf countries’ interception capabilities are closely tied to U.S. technology.

“Gulf air defense systems and their performance remain closely linked to U.S.-enabled radar coverage, early warning, and operational coordination – interceptions over Qatar, for example, rely heavily on radar networks connected to Al Udeid Air base, while missile engagements in Kuwait occur in airspace shared with American aircraft,” Schiavi added.

The Singapore Airshow, organized here from Feb 3-8, marks the first time the T-Scope has been shown overseas. The device was designed specifically for unguided munitions and uses a variety of sensors and AI to instantly calculate and predict the projectile flight paths, taking into account environmental and physical factors.

“What we’re doing rather than placing sensors on the rocket itself, is we are putting them into an AI-driven guidance kit, which essentially transforms unguided rockets into precision-guided munitions to improve their accuracy for cheaper,” Alan Kuo, Tron Future’s director of sales, told Defense News.

Taiwan has been gradually building up its inventory of anti-tank weapons, including an unknown number of unguided rocket-propelled grenades, to deter potential attacks.

Wang said they were approached by one of the country’s leading defense institutes to develop a device that could help quickly mobilize personnel, if needed.

“By combining automated complex ballistic calculations and displaying a live corrected aiming point, T.Scope allows soldiers to achieve marksman-level proficiency within a very compressed training timeframe,” Kuo added. “It would allow for combat readiness even under limited preparation.”

Although it has already been tested, the company is hopeful that it will receive army certification before the end of the year.

Further testing has already been planned to see how it performs in shallow water, per a request from the undisclosed defense institute.

The National Chung-Shan Institute of Science Technology, or NCSIST, is largely regarded as the leading research and development center in the defense sector in Taiwan. It focuses on designing and producing indigenous weapons, including missiles and unmanned systems.

Tron Future’s counter-drone radars have been used by the Taiwanese Army for several years. The company has also been assisting the government in integrating counter-drone technologies with Taiwan’s low Earth orbit satellites through its T.SpaceRouter user terminals to increase the island’s communication resilience.

The move came ahead of a silent march that will take place here on Jan. 31 to pay respect and show solidarity to the veterans following remarks made by U.S. President Donald Trump, which discredited the role NATO allied troops played during the war.

In a recent interview with Fox News, the president claimed that while allies sent soldiers to help U.S. troops, they “stayed a little back and a little off the frontlines.” Trump added that the U.S. “never really needed them” in the conflict.

The comments sparked a significant wave of anger among Danish leaders and veterans, who stated that such remarks were disrespectful and insulting to the sacrifices made by Danish troops and those of other countries.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Washington invoked NATO’s Article 5 for the first and only time in history. Denmark was among the first countries to respond to the call for collective defense and deployed troops, as well as military equipment, which played an important part in supporting U.S. operations during the war in Afghanistan in 2002.

A total of 44 Danish soldiers were killed before the Scandinavian country officially pulled out all of its personnel in 2021. The flags placed in flower boxes at the U.S. building in Copenhagen had their names on them before they were removed by embassy staff.

Danish media TV2 reported that they were taken down “as part of the building’s security measures.” Following widespread outrage, the flags were reinstalled and authorized to remain in place.

Residents told Defense News that the tensions between the two countries in recent weeks, centered on a threat made by the Trump administration to use military force to seize control over Greenland, have caused a major loss of confidence in Washington as a credible ally.

“It really hurts to hear those comments and erodes trust. … They were a friend, a big brother for us. It’s been hard to grasp everything that has unfolded,” said Hans Peter H. Michaelsen, a defense analyst who served for over 40 years in the Royal Danish Air Force.

One American citizen who has been residing in Copenhagen for over a year said that he and his family also plan to attend the Jan 31. demonstration to show support.

Dubbed the Dataroom, the secure digital environment will allow Ukrainian defense companies to train and validate their algorithms by relying on real-world intelligence on Russian aerial threats collected by the country’s military.

The workspace has been envisioned with the goal of equipping interceptor drones with AI to enhance their target detection, classification and neutralization capabilities.

“In the future, we plan to expand the Dataroom’s abilities to other areas related to autonomy and AI – but for now, our focus is on the most urgent task: countering the threats that appear in our skies, Shahed-type drones,” Mykhailo Fedorov, the Ukrainian Minister of Defense, wrote in a post on his LinkedIn page.

The official noted that while interceptor drones have been effective on the battlefield, defending against thousands of targets requires a high degree of autonomy and the ability for the systems to identify and counter targets independently.

The Dataroom is currently only accessible to Ukrainian industry, primarily due to the sensitivity of the information used for training.

Palantir Technologies, co-founded by libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel, opened an office in Kyiv and has cooperated significantly with Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation. The company’s MetaConstellation software is used by Ukraine to gather and visualize data of enemy positions and equipment via a network of commercial satellites, sensors, drones, and other systems.

Ukrainian military commander Oleksandr Syrskyi said in an interview with online media outlet lb.ua this week that Russia can produce more than 400 different kinds of Shahed-type drones daily and that it plans to increase this number to 1,000.

Governments here are pouncing on an opening in the rhetoric from the White House, where Vice President J.D. Vance has presented an ostensible neglect in Europeans securing Greenland as the main driver in the Trump administration’s push to acquire the island, which is a territory of Denmark.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly proffered the idea of the United States taking over Greenland on account of its geostrategic location for U.S. homeland defense, by military force if necessary − a move that would be unprecedented among NATO alliance members.

New efforts by governments here now seem to be aimed at boosting Europe’s and Denmark’s footprint in and around Greenland in the spirit of assuaging U.S. concerns, effectively giving the American partner no reason for going rogue.

Talk has been loud among European policy elites that a NATO Arctic mission modeled on the alliance’s Baltic Sentry project might be forthcoming. The idea has been discussed by top-level officials from Germany, the U.K., France, Belgium and other European NATO countries, mostly behind closed doors. Belgian Defense Minister Theo Francken was the first official to publicly call for the creation of such a mission earlier this month.

Germany’s counterpart, Boris Pistorius, announced prospects for a stronger European NATO presence in the Arctic on Jan. 13 during a meeting with EU foreign policy and defense chief Kaja Kallas in Berlin. He specifically referenced a possible NATO mission called “Arctic Sentry,” though he cautioned that this would require a NATO framework and “that cannot be ready in the next four weeks or, in my estimation, even three months,” he said.

Until then, he said, key European NATO nations agreed they will need to send clear signals that the continent was stepping up to better defend the Arctic territory together with the U.S.

The U.S. military already has a base on Greenland, currently housing 150 troops in Pituffik who are mainly devoted to ballistic missile early warning and space surveillance. That number is down from well over a thousand troops previously deployed under a still-valid contract with Denmark that has allowed Washington to establish bases and move military assets at will on the Arctic Island since 1951 and for as long as NATO exists.

Alliance officials insist there has been no decision made yet to create an Arctic Sentry mission. Speaking at a Swedish security conference over the weekend, Alexus Grynkewich, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, said that while all Arctic operations had been merged under Joint Force Command Norfolk last month, it was premature to assume that the alliance would launch a dedicated mission.

Despite the newfound urgency from European capitals, Arctic defense is hardly new on the radar of treaty organization officials, with the region’s existing and growing strategic importance being well-known for decades and NATO forces working in and around Greenland since the Cold War.

In that vein, NATO had a “very good discussion” on the topic of Arctic security in the summer of last year, and the alliance is now working on the next steps, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said at the Global Europe Forum in Brussels on Jan. 13. He said security in the high north was already raised by Trump in his first term, with sea lanes opening up, and Russia and China being more active.

“It’s not for peaceful purposes, they’re not studying the seals and the polar bears,” Grynkewich said, referring to Russian and Chinese vessels in the area. “They’re out there doing bathymetric surveys and trying to figure out how they can counter NATO capabilities on and under the sea. So that’s something that could grow very quickly, and we need to be mindful of it and ready.”

“In NATO, we all agree that when it comes to the protection of the Arctic, we have to work together, and that’s exactly what we are doing,” Rutte said. That goes beyond the seven NATO members that border the Arctic, he noted, citing comments by the United Kingdom and Germany on their willingness to keep the region safe.

Rutte also cited Denmark’s investment in Boeing P-8 maritime patrol aircraft, long-range drones, F-35s and air-to-air refueling, saying all of those are capabilities for defending the country, NATO and the Arctic region as a whole.

Any NATO presence in the region would include a package combining manned platforms, such as frigates, with unmanned technologies like drones, a NATO official told Defense News on Tuesday, speaking on the condition of anonymity. However, the official noted that integrating these types of technologies in the harsh conditions found in an Arctic environment will be significantly more challenging than in the Baltic or Mediterranean seas.

Meanwhile, one Danish lawmaker challenged Trump’s characterization of threats to Greenland, specifically refuting his claims about Chinese and Russian ships in the region. The pushback by Stine Bosse, a Danish member of the European Parliament, centers on Trump’s Jan. 11 statement that Greenland “is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place.”

In conversation with Mark Rutte days later, Bosse said there was “not one single Chinese or Russian ship around Greenland, let that be stated as a fact.”

One of the Trump administration’s key talking points to justify its threats to seize Greenland has been that Denmark is unable to adequately defend its autonomous territory in the high north.

To many Europeans, the most urgent threat to Greenland right now seems not to be China, Russia or North Korea but rather their longtime ally in the form of the United States.

The people of Greenland are “scared stiff, they’re stressed and they’re more than just worried,” Bosse told Rutte in Brussels. And they overwhelmingly reject annexation by the United States: A mere six percent of Greenlanders were in favor when asked in an early 2025 poll.

“Nothing about Greenland without Greenland,” Greenland’s Foreign Minister Vivian Motzfeldt told reporters while speaking in Denmark earlier this week. And Greenland has chosen to side with Denmark, in no uncertain terms.

“We are now facing a geopolitical crisis, and if we have to choose between the United States and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark,” Greenland’s prime minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen said while speaking alongside Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen on Tuesday. “We choose NATO. We choose the Kingdom of Denmark. We choose the EU,” he added.

Speaking in Berlin yesterday, the EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas suggested there were ongoing discussions behind closed doors on what concrete measures were available to counter the threats from the United States.

“The least we can say is that would be a really unprecedented situation in the history of NATO and the history of any defense alliance in the world,” added Pistorius, referring to a situation in which the Trump administration would follow through and take over Greenland one way or another.

And while the 1951 agreement between Washington and Copenhagen on U.S. troops on the island remains active, so too is a Danish standing order from the same period that requires the country’s troops to open fire even without orders if foreign troops were to try and capture Greenland.

On Dec. 15, the SBU published a video on its official government affiliated website reportedly showing the Sub Sea Baby drone striking a part of the Kilo-class submarine stationed at the Novorossiysk Russian naval base.

The available recording shows a major explosion around the stern area of the Russian submarine, which likely resulted in notable damage to components of the platform. However, the specifics have not been independently confirmed.

“For the first time in history, underwater drones ‘Sub Sea Baby’ blew up the Russian submarine of the class 636.3 (NATO classified as Kilo) – as a result of the explosion, it suffered critical damage and was put out of action,” the SBU wrote in a statement.

The submarine was forced to stay put in the Novorossiysk port due to the effective use of Sea Baby surface naval drones, which displaced Russian ships from Sevastopol Bay, it added.

The Russian Ministry of Defense maintains that the attack was unsuccessful and that all vessels at the naval base are intact.

The footage appears to have been taken from cameras around the port, suggesting that the Ukrainian military likely managed to infiltrate the network to surveil Russian activity inside the naval base.

Very little information is known about the capabilities and functioning of the Sub Sea Baby underwater drone; other than that it was specifically designed for the SBU. The language included in the SBU announcement frames the attack as having included multiple units of these drones.

According to an industry source in Ukraine, who wished to remain anonymous for security reasons, next to no one was aware of the operation ahead of time since the naval drone is part of non-public projects with extremely restricted access. For instance, the source noted that the manufacturer of the Sea Baby has not even gone public yet with its identity.

As noted by Naval News, the drone appears to operate as a type of autonomous torpedo, which, if true, could enable it to be guided in the direction and proximity of the target using waypoints prior to its own systems taking over and steering it independently.

“This could explain how the Sub Sea Baby was able to navigate inside the naval base and towards the submarine pen, a route that requires several turns in confined spaces,” the online platform stated in a report.

Following President Donald Trump’s expressed interest in January of acquiring 40 new icebreakers for the U.S. Coast Guard, Helsinki has set its sights on scoring what could be a major deal with Washington.

Before his visit to meet with the American leader in Florida last month, Finnish President Alexander Stubb said that he hoped “icebreaker diplomacy would help Finland maintain good relations with the U.S. and Trump.”

However, the country is not the only one in line, as a major Canadian shipbuilder specialized in the construction of such vessels wants a piece of the business.

“Finland is most definitely trying to build the U.S. icebreakers in Finland. … The discussions we’ve been having with the U.S. is around whether they could take our design and use it to build their icebreakers domestically in their own shipyards,” David Hargreaves, senior vice president of business development at Seaspan, told Defense News.

“That concept seems to be getting a fair level of traction both in Washington at a political level,” he added. “We had last week a visit of a U.S. congressman, and we’ve been having various conversations with U.S. yards who are in a position to build these types of vessels,” he added.

Under U.S. law most Coast Guard vessels and their major components must be constructed in American shipyards to support national industries and enhance national security. However, exceptions may be authorized by the president.

Trump has been adamant that he wants the vessels to be delivered quickly, as the ones operated by the country’s Coast Guard are approaching retirement age, but he also wants to rejuvenate national shipbuilding capabilities.

“It really depends where America puts its priority – if it’s on schedule, then Finland is probably the right answer. If they continue to put priority, which they have, on having their own sovereign shipbuilding capability, then Finland is not the right answer,” Hargreaves said.

Another possibility, he noted, may be that Washington opts for a hybrid strategy, where they could buy one or several icebreakers from Finland to get those faster while simultaneously having a program to build the rest in the United States.

While Trump’s has been talking about 40 new vessels, a 2023 Coast Guard fleet mix analysis concluded that the service would need between 8 to 9 polar icebreakers, including four to five heavy ones as well as medium ones, to conduct its Arctic missions effectively in the future.

Trade relations between Canada and the U.S. have been significantly strained over the last few months due to a series of tariffs and retaliatory actions. On April 9, Ottawa extended the rates placed on U.S. automobiles and parts, as Washington announced a 90-day pause on certain tariffs, but the 10% standard on most Canadian imports remained.

The shipbuilding industry has somehow largely been spared from such economic strains, with joint work between the two neighbors persisting, said Hargreaves.

“We are a business, we are looking at opportunities. Selling our design to them or our services around helping them to build icebreakers is a business opportunity – we are not going to get caught up in some of the current fuss and have a longer outlook,” he said, referring to Trump government.

Meanwhile, all three countries are still respectively trying to figure out how to implement the trilateral Icebreaker Collaboration Effort, or ICE Pact, aimed at combining Finnish, Canadian. and American expertise on the Arctic.

Country representatives are set to meet again in May to discuss more concrete steps on icebreaker design and production, shipyard workforce development and research related to polar regions.

In a Jan. 24 press briefing, Trump announced a target of acquiring roughly 40 icebreakers for the U.S. Coast Guard.

“We’re going to order about 40 Coast Guard big icebreakers – big ones – and all of a sudden, Canada wants a piece of the deal. … I say, ‘Why are we doing that,’” he told reporters.

On March 4, the U.S. government reinstated an executive order that hit its northern neighbor with 25% across-the-board tariffs and 10% on Canadian energy, triggering a continental trade war. Ottawa has responded with its retaliatory tariffs at the same rate but placed on a smaller basket of American goods.

According to Canadian shipbuilder Seaspan, in charge of building two new heavy polar icebreakers for the country’s Coast Guard, the Canadian naval industry already possesses the requisite know-how for Trump’s plan.

“40 icebreakers are fantastic, but that is pretty aggressive – I don’t want to go against what Mr. Trump said, but I would say that the U.S. shipbuilding industry capability is pretty stressed and busy right now. … I think it’s fair to say that it is not [currently] capable of doing that,” David Hargreaves, senior vice president of business development at Seaspan, told Defense News.

“He also said that Canada is trying to get a part of it – what we are trying to do is be a contributor to our neighbors and help them,” he added.

The economic rift between the two nations does not appear to have negatively impacted the shipbuilding industry so far. On the contrary, companies from both sides of the border continue to engage in dialogue and appear determined to carry out business as usual.

Davie, a Quebec shipbuilder, told Defense News earlier this year that it was moving forward with plans to acquire an American shipyard despite the threat of a looming trade war.

Canadian and Finnish government representatives shared similar perspectives in Feb. 4 email statements, stating that the tense climate seen as of late between Canada and the U.S. had not compromised cooperation within the trilateral Icebreaker Collaboration Effort.

While that agreement, signed last summer and known as the ICE Pact, seeks to bring together Finnish, Canadian and U.S. expertise to build best-in-class ice boats and cooperate in other areas, Hargreaves notes that Washington has the most to gain from it when it comes to gaining knowledge.

“I don’t think it explicitly says this, but it is really about helping the U.S. to build their icebreaking capability,” he said.

Whereas Finland and Canada have long histories of manufacturing these vessels, America has lagged behind. For example, the U.S. Coast Guard has not launched a new heavy icebreaker since 1976.

U.S. regulations have previously required that military vessels be built domestically. Two new bills introduced last month by Utah senators Mike Lee and John Curtis, both Republicans, seek to modify these practices, placing greater emphasis on shipyards in NATO countries or in trusted Indo-Pacific nations for getting America’s ship count up quickly.

Regardless of the bills’ prospects for adoption, Canada’s Seaspan is already putting itself in a position to help out.

“We are exploring how a U.S. shipyard(s) could use our existing Canadian Coast Guard Multi-Purpose Vessel design, a polar class 4 icebreaker that could be relatively easily upgraded to class 3,” Hargreaves wrote in an email.

Talks are already underway with the U.S. Coast Guard about cooperating. The Americans are “very interested” in the ship design, according to the company.