Threats in the Arctic are not primarily military. Maintaining the Arctic as a zone of peace is very important and an opportunity for collaboration between the United States and Canada. There are threats in the Arctic, but they're not military.
My personal view is that the most severe, the most imminent threat is that a ship loaded with petroleum products is going to hit an unmarked shoal off the coast of Canada or Alaska and that we are going to very quickly discover that our nations are not fully prepared to conduct the kinds of disaster response operations or conduct the environmental cleanup operations that will be absolutely essential to limit damage in such a scenario.
Our coast guards have been focusing a great deal of attention on this challenge, but you know better than I do that the problem in the Arctic is lack of infrastructure to support these kinds of disaster response operations. Where is the communications infrastructure? Where are the port facilities? Where are the landing strips necessary to clean up a devastating oil spill? That is the challenge.
I had the honour of leading the Department of Defense's response to our Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. We were able to bring in many hundreds of thousands of yards of booms, provide a great number of ships to skim the oil—all kinds of capabilities. To bring that to the Arctic would be enormously difficult.
It gets me back to my initial point, and that is to ask how the United States and Canada can collaborate from the perspective of investing in capabilities in the Arctic so that we are not duplicating capabilities but we rely on each other, so that we have a sensible approach such that both nations together can invest, in a collaborative approach that makes sense for both of our nations.