I've had experts who work in the military and elsewhere tell me that the problem with Russia seizing a few of our islands would not be so much that we would have to reclaim those islands as it would that the Russians who are there would have to be rescued. With the distances they would have to go and the weather they would have to go through to sustain forces up there, I think, as the two professors have identified, the real threat to the Arctic is these missiles. It's not the random Chinese intelligence ship. That's not a real threat to their seizing territory.
We must remember that most of the Russian investment is in protecting their Arctic rather than jumping across to our side of the Arctic.
It's just a very expensive place. There's a reason we haven't spent as much as we would like to in the north—once we get started on thinking about these things, they become very expensive very quickly. As expensive as it is for us, it's also expensive for the Russians.
They are worried about having this back door, which has long been secure but is now more open thanks to climate change. They're worried about protecting that more than they are about poaching our side of the Arctic. They talk a good game about it, but that's not really a major threat to us.
We've learned that their procurement systems are highly corrupt. They can't maintain tires for their truck system. One bit of speculation about why they are not using their air force as much as we thought they would in this war is that the logistics of supplying the planes with parts may be bad. They may not have been flying as many training sessions because, as they say, the second currency of the Russian military is fuel, and they are using fuel that they get, which is supposed to be used for training and operations, to buy other things or to enrich themselves, and therefore they're not really that capable of jumping across the Arctic and sustaining that for any length or period of time.
The missile threat is real but the conventional threat is not so much.