Things break in the bitter cold of America’s northern reaches. Batteries die. Fuel and other vital fluids freeze. Vehicles become trapped in ice and snow. Appendages and limbs? If soldiers aren’t careful, such injuries can unravel any semblance of situational control.
Survival in Alaska’s vast wilderness, where any hint of complacency can indeed kill, presents a colossal difficulty. Training service members to fight in these environs is an undertaking even more daunting.
For the soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 11th Airborne Division, this task rests, ultimately, on the shoulders of Maj. Gen. John Cogbill and the capable leaders he advises.
And the commanding general of the Arctic Angels would not trade it for anything.
“We have a saying that everything breaks at 40 below,” Cogbill says when asked about these challenges.
Everything, except morale.
From the outside, the soldiers of the 11th Airborne appear to be built differently. But Cogbill insists that’s not the case.
Perhaps it’s the frigid air, wilderness that stretches beyond the horizon or a sky that unleashes snow without end, but troops reporting to Alaska for the first time often do so with “trepidation in their eyes,” he says.
“But when I see them six months later, after they’ve been through their cold-weather indoctrination course and gone out to the field, they realize their team leader, their squad leader, their platoon sergeant — they’re being taken care of,” he says.
“We’re not going to give them something they can’t handle. Then they start to build that trust in their leaders and trust in themselves. That’s when they truly become Arctic-tough.”
Achieving that rare brand of toughness requires both sound leadership and reliable equipment, Cogbill says. Nestled in a region that places the 11th Airborne at a crucial convergence of three combatant commands — U.S. Pacific Command, U.S. Northern Command and U.S. European Command — a soldier’s ability to trust in both is the difference between success and failure.
Cogbill spoke to Military Times about what goes into earning that trust, and how a relentless pursuit of innovation is critical to keeping abreast of distant developments that would be reduced to ruin in the far North.
For the Arctic Angels, accounting for their surroundings is part of the fun.
“Winter is always coming in Alaska,” Cogbill says. “They embrace it.”
Editor’s note: Some answers have been edited for clarity.
MT: We’re watching the Arctic domain become increasingly vital, with threats evolving rapidly. How are developments in the region impacting how you’re preparing your soldiers?
Cogbill: The Department of War has an Arctic strategy for a reason. We can range any of these locations and be within 90% of the industrial world within nine hours.
Billy Mitchell, the father of the modern-day Air Force, said whoever owns Alaska owns the world. It’s a power projection platform in any of those directions — west of the International Date Line to the Indo-Pacific or over the pole to Europe.
Therefore, we have to be able to fight in different environments. But we optimize for the Arctic, because we’re the only Arctic division.
We have to have certain vehicles that no other unit has, such as the Cold Weather All-Terrain Vehicle (CATV), the workhorse for moving soldiers and equipment over snow.
We have to be proficient in skis and snowshoes. We have to be able to jump out of airplanes with this gear. We have to be able to do air assault missions with this kit and then sustain ourselves — not just survive, but fight and thrive.
You mentioned unique equipment. Today’s tech does not universally function in Arctic extremes. How are your troops innovating to overcome those challenges?
Drones are a hot topic right now, and it’s something that I’d say we’re catching up a little bit with the rest of the Army.
We’re not a Transformation-in-Contact division, which means we didn’t have an initial fielding of a large number of small- and medium-range drones. But continuous transformation is a mindset for the 11th Airborne Division, which means we’re learning and adapting quickly, and we’re also bootstrapping this effort by learning from other divisions in the Army and how they’ve utilized first-person-view drones, either for reconnaissance or for strike.
So, we are collaborating with these other divisions — like the 101st Airborne Division and the 25th Infantry Division — to get our own parts, stand up our own Arctic innovation labs and build similar systems.
The difference is, if we want to fly these drones in Alaska during our winter training exercise, the battery life will be about 1/20th of what it is in the Pacific. So, we’re trying to figure out ways to prolong battery life, to build drones that are more capable in high wind, high altitude and sub-freezing temperatures.
Something that works anywhere else in the world — we bring it up to Alaska, take it out to the field and put it through its paces.
If it doesn’t work, then we have innovation partners — academic partners at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, for instance — who we go to and say, “Hey, this is an engineering problem. What can you do to help us?”
They’ve got one of the best small UAS engineering programs in the entire world, because they live and operate in this environment.
So, we share as much as we can, learn from our peers and work closely with the modernization enterprise to pioneer some of these efforts.
When you’re seeking those solutions, what combat lessons can you learn from places like Ukraine or Iran, which may be inherently different environmentally?
There are certain things that just work differently in the Arctic. Mobility is harder, going from point A to point B. Sustainment is harder when you’re talking about moving things off-road through waist-deep snow. Battery life is shortened, which means you have to resupply more often. Water can’t be delivered in bulk. Fuel has to be delivered in cubed ice.
Those are all the logistical challenges. For the individual soldier, it’s about just being able to maneuver.
Common across all these operating environments are the need for decision dominance and for human-machine teaming.
So, we understand the importance of drones, which is why we’re catching up as fast as we can and working with the Army Materiel Command and SkyFoundry initiative to get as many of these drones as possible into the hands of our soldiers so they can operate in any environment.
For the decision dominance piece, it’s about being able to develop a common operating picture and a common intel picture at echelon.
Everywhere from the rifle squad up to the division and corps, all the way up to a combatant commander — where we can see the enemy, see ourselves and use all the sensors at our disposal to make decisions about how to strike most efficiently.
We’re using existing exercises and joint partners to pass targets through tactical data links to do machine-to-machine communication, gain and maintain custody of targets and increase our lethality as a division and warfighting headquarters.
When it comes to unmanned and AI integration, what is your command doing to ensure soldiers are critical thinkers who can inform sound decision-making?
It varies depending on the echelon of command. As the division commander, I’m responsible for every decision we make as a division, whether it’s in training or combat. If I make a decision to strike a target, I own that decision and the outcome.
A culture where commanders feel empowered also means a culture of accountability. Having commanders in the loop — although the machines and AI are evolving rapidly, the Army still expects us as commanders to use judgment and experience to make a call to strike or not strike.
You have to practice that. You have to get reps and sets, and do it through training as often as you can. So, we do exercises every 90 days to help us see the strengths and weaknesses of the algorithms, to code, to work with the engineers and our own operators.
We need to be able to program new strategies and develop agentic AI solutions for targeting that allow us to not only find optimal solutions for shortening kill chains, but also to be able to incorporate large language models in things like rules of engagement and lessons learned.
Anything that we’re doing in a training exercise can then be referenced using these large language models to make us better, to make my decisions faster, better, more informed and hopefully yield better outcomes.
Over the last few years, it is the speed of innovation that has been most staggering. How do you ensure the 11th Airborne is up to speed a year or five years from now?
With the proliferation of these machines — and not just at my level or the squad level, but throughout our formations — we have to train and rehearse this physically.
I mentioned digital targeting, but when you talk about the mechanics of lethal squads, platoons and company commanders who are trying to converge fire and maneuver, you have to put that into live-fire training.
Our brigades at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson recently went through nine company iterations of combined arms live fire. In every single one of those live fires, they were employing FPV drones in a strike capability and in a reconnaissance capability, while also trying to think, “Where would the enemy be attacking us right now? What is our counter-UAS posture?”
So, you’re adding another dimension to a company commander’s thought process as they try to make tactical decisions about how to assault an objective. Again, it’s getting those reps and sets. It becomes ingrained in them that there’s always a machine aspect.
So, maybe you’re a battalion commander, and you have to think, “Who can see me right now? Who can see this command post? How many tents do I have set up? What does that look like from above? What does it look like in the summer? What does it look like in the winter, when I’ve got a green tent on a snowy landscape?”
Or, if you’re one step ahead, maybe you set up a white tent, but then you have to consider, “What kind of EW signature am I emitting that can be picked up by a machine or a sensor? What does my heat signature look like? Because I’ve got all these bodies and machines cranking out processing power inside of a tent.”
So, how do you mitigate that? It requires constant thought about how we see the enemy, but also how the enemy sees us, and making sure that we can adapt and stay ahead.
That’s where I think those lessons learned from the battle labs in Ukraine, Operation Epic Fury and other places inform the way we train. That feedback loop has to be super fast, because we can’t be everywhere and do everything, but we can certainly learn from everywhere.
So, if we can use large language models to put all these lessons learned into a one-stop shop, it makes it a lot easier for us to access all that knowledge and incorporate it into how we train every single day.
You’re not just dealing with tech that needs to work, but a changing landscape as well. Impacts of climate change have opened up sea lanes. Chinese-Russian collaboration has surged as a result. How is the Army adapting to those changes?
We’re worldwide deployable and the Pentagon’s only Arctic division, but we could go anywhere.
We’re very aware of the collusion between adversaries and what that would mean to us. With environmental changes — you talked about sea lanes opening — there are also strategic choke points, and we’re seeing how important choke points can be — like the Strait of Hormuz or Bab al-Mandeb in the Red Sea.
We have the Bering Strait right off the coast of Alaska. And there are people in our neighborhood who don’t always have the best interests of the United States in mind.
So, how do we deter? That’s probably the most important thing we can do is deter an adversary from thinking, “Today’s the day that we’re going to go. We’re going to take a shot at the United States of America.”
You deter through forward presence. You deter through people who are trained, and you deter through capable partners that are able to prevail if it goes from competition to crisis to conflict.
That’s what we’re trying to build every day through Operation Pathways. As we train with our multinational partners, we need the ability to project power, to put ourselves astride some of those strategic choke points and be capable of holding adversaries at bay if they start to encroach on our national boundaries.
You mentioned that everything breaks at -40. But there is a certain love, among troops, in shared misery. How do your junior enlisted stay motivated?
We get our soldiers from the same basic training as anywhere else.
They may be coming from Hawaii. They may be coming from Fort Polk. But when they arrive in Alaska, they realize they have a job to do, and they are going to be expected to operate anywhere from -20 to -40, which was the range of temperatures during our last Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center rotation in February.
That’s expected. That’s what our nation needs us to do. And they rise to the occasion.
My sergeant major and I use the ANGELS acronym to remind soldiers of our expectations of every paratrooper in the 11th Airborne Division as the Arctic Angels.
The A is for Arctic tough. Everybody, whether you’re a sustainer, a cyber warrior or an infantryman, has to be Arctic tough, and you’ve got to be able to operate in that environment.
The N means you’ve got to be able to fight at night. Night fighters have to own the night and maintain that advantage over our enemies.
The G represents being a great teammate, whether that’s inside of your team, squad, company, up to your higher headquarters or down to a subordinate unit. We demand that you be a great teammate.
The E represents being experts in the fundamentals — your PT, marksmanship, battle drills, medical training and mobility. This means a lot. Being part of the 11th Airborne Division means you’ve got to be able to jump out of a plane, air assault, move on snowshoes and skis, pull a sled — do all that’s expected.
The L is to be lethal. That’s why we exist — to close with and destroy the enemy anywhere in the world.
And then lastly, the S. We need soldiers to be standard bearers. Because if you violate a standard in the Arctic, people lose a finger, a hand, a leg or a life. It’s a natural risk to operate in this environment, so we need leaders who are very engaged, who know the standard, who uphold it and model it themselves. That builds trust in the organization.
There’s ultimately so much value in Arctic warfare expertise. Not only are we training Rangers, jump masters, air assault and repel masters, but these are people who have learned how to fight and not just survive, but thrive in these conditions.
And once you’ve served in Alaska, you kind of never want to leave. Most people come here a little bit nervous, but they leave kicking and screaming.
That expertise is only enhanced when working with other services and allies. The Marines this year announced an Alaska rotation, for instance. Do you anticipate more collaboration as the region receives greater focus?
We’re all about joint training opportunities and service interoperability. When we do our annual training exercise up there in the Yukon Training Area, we invite all of our multinational partners and all of our joint partners.
We’ll never fight alone. We’ll never fight as just an Army, and we’ll never fight as just the United States of America. We want everybody to come together.
There is plenty of training area in the Joint Pacific Alaskan Range Complex. It’s two and a half times the size of the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California. So, imagine all that wild and wonderful wilderness out there with very permissive airspace and a lot of maneuver area.
So, the more the merrier for us, and those joint training opportunities help us see gaps and seams where maybe our machines are not talking. But we want to be able to seamlessly have a common operating picture and share a common intel picture on a single pane of glass.
You can’t know if you can do it well or not unless you train together on a regular basis, so we welcome that opportunity.
Part of maximizing training is budgeting for it. If you were going to pitch the importance of the Arctic to those who distribute those resources, what would you say?
With the budget, it’ll work out, and soldiers will find ways to train. PT is free, so if we have physically fit, Arctic-tough soldiers, then that’s what we’re going to be.
We can go out there and train in the elements and do all those things we’ve discussed, but I think the most important thing is that we have to be able to project this power. Alaska is far away from a lot, but it’s strategically located at the center of three combatant commands.
If you’re going to build an Arctic-capable lethal fighting force, you have to be able to get it to the fight, whether that’s in the Pacific, Europe, or anywhere else in the world.
When I served in Alaska 25 years ago, we had an airborne battalion task force, but now we have an entire division that’s airborne and air assault capable. And we have these cold-weather all-terrain vehicles. We have all of the kit that the Army has invested in.
How do you get it to the fight? That’s infrastructure, that’s power projection, that’s joint interoperability with the Air Force to make sure we can get there. That’s understanding the sea lines of communication that you brought up earlier, so we can float those things and get it there fast enough.
That goes to our ready-forward concept with Operation Pathways. Not only do we train with multinational partners to build that interoperability and trust, but we also train in those locations to be west of the International Date Line with soldiers and equipment.
So, if we need to do something somewhere in the Pacific, we’re already there with our gear. That really shortens the commute time, if you will.
It’s critically important that we maintain that capability.
