Canada and US National Guards in Exercise Guerrier Nordique

by Jay Heisler

In March of this year, there were joint military exercises with the Canadian Army cooperating with the national guards of Vermont, New Hampshire, Virginia and Alaska, plus active-duty members of the Army, Navy and Marine Corps.

Called Guerrier Nordique, the initiative first saw the involvement of the Vermont National Guard in 2012.

Members of the Vermont National Guard kindly sat down with RUSI(NS) writer Jay Heisler when he visited their base in Colchester, Vermont, and emailed materials for background on this report.

This year there were nine Vermont Guard members participating in Guerrier Nordique, and another 18 New Hampshire, Virginia and Alaska Guard members participating.

Vermont National Guard Captain Mikel Arcovitch writes for the US Army website the following:

“GN provides service members with experience operating and surviving in the extreme climate of the High Arctic. The exercise highlights the strong Canadian and U.S. military relationship while providing challenging training in a joint environment. The lessons learned from Guerrier Nordique are brought back to units across the U.S. military and help inform future Arctic-focused decisions.”

In 2023, the New York National Guard played a prominent role in the exercises, with members of the 105th Airlift Wing based out of Stewart Air National Guard Base in Newburgh, New York.

The official Air National Guard website included the following quote as an example of the exercises value:

“We flew 2000 miles. We landed on an austere field which is something most cargo planes don’t do. We unloaded and loaded cargo and people and flew another 2000 miles back basically all on our own,” said Lt. Col. Andrew Townsend, a pilot assigned to the 105th Airlift Wing. “When you think about the strategic value that demonstrates to our potential adversaries that the C-17 can operate on its own in extreme conditions without support on the ground.”

Exercises in the Arctic are projected to be more common as the region thaws with climate change, opening up a new front in our strategic calculus for homeland defense.

The author of this report recently published a piece with Voice of America on Arctic security that interviewed the Chinese embassy in the US, and which was picked up as an article linked to from the Encyclopedia Britannica website entry for the Arctic.

In Canadian security, the Arctic is becoming such an urgent topic that this year the Canadian Intelligence Conference (CANIC) 2024 by the Canadian Military Intelligence Association focused entirely on just the topic of Arctic security for Canada.

Jay Heisler is Voice of America’s Canada reporter.  He also teaches a mental health advocacy course at a Canadian university and works on various training and education projects in national security in the US and Canada.  He is currently working on a book contract and at other freelance writing.  This work is the sole opinion of the author and does not necessarily represent the views of the Royal United Services Institute of Nova Scotia, Canadian Armed Forces, Canadian Department of National Defence or any other government department and agency.  The author may be contacted by webmail at RUSI(NS).