Name: Inside a Military Bootcamp With Green Berets Training for Arctic Warfare
Uploaded: 2026-02-09T17:00:00Z
Duration: 13 min 38 s
Description: WSJ's Sune Rasmussen joins U.S. Special Forces in a grueling Arctic training camp to understand why subzero survival skills are crucial for the future of war.

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WSJ's Sune Rasmussen joins U.S. Special Forces in a grueling Arctic training camp to understand why subzero survival skills are crucial for the future of war. Photo: Eve Hartley

https://m.wsj.net/video/20260208/6ca4cc12-6cc0-427b-920f-e44d2035fd1e/4/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

WSJ's Sune Rasmussen joins U.S. Special Forces in a grueling Arctic training camp to understand why subzero survival skills are crucial for the future of war.

Inside a Military Bootcamp With Green Berets Training for Arctic Warfare 

Tensions in the Arctic are rising. Global superpowers are competing for natural resources, trading routes, and a strategic location, to better understand what a potential war in this area would look like. I will be training with a group of US special forces as they prep for a potential war against Russia.

Sergeant: It's a whole other level of cold. One of our teammates ended up with frostbite on the fingers.

I'm not gonna lie, this training is a little bit intimidating. I'll be skiing through the woods with a heavy rucksack, lunging through the ice into freezing cold water.

Denis: Wasn't that bad.

Oh, talk to me in five minutes. And camping outside on my own in minus 30 degrees Celsius.

Boiling water, negative 31 out on ice.

We've set up camp in the woods. I'm boiling some snow for my lunch. It's cold again today. The course here focuses on teaching participants three key skills, survival, tactics, and operations, all in extreme cold. I'm the first civilian to ever take part.

I would say four days is the minimum how to be taught how to survive in the element. The only real enemy is the cold. He won't forgive anything.

Sune: The team of US special forces I'm embedding with for 10 days are just some of the nearly 100 soldiers sent by NATO members here to learn how to fight in this extreme environment. The Americans are Green Berets with years of experience from the deserts and jungles of the Middle East and Asia. We agreed to keep their identities anonymous.

Everybody within the NATO has switched focus from global war on terrorists to the Arctic.

Sune: The reason? Russia and the growing tensions around this highly strategic part of the High North.

Before you set your skis into position, make sure that you clean your skins so they don't freeze firm. In these conditions hypothermia can happen quickly. If the wind picks up, moisture in your uniform, or if we have a minor casualty, the speed within the we're gonna have hypothermia is gonna increase heavily.

Sune: Basically every time you take a break, you wanna make sure you don't get cold. So you immediately put on a puffer jacket and we put it underneath this white camouflage. So you trap the body heat that you've been generating while skiing. People put on fresh hats, bigger hats, and if necessary, you also change socks. The biggest risk out here is essentially freezing to death.

I don't carry an ax all the time. This is a Silky Saw. What you guys can do. Beating it down. I'm gonna use this as my brace. A couple strikes. Breathing just nice. You guys have any questions?

I have to admit I have not made many fires outside. That's a first. There's a very serious backdrop to exercises like this and their interest in courses like these has grown a lot in the past three to four years, but especially since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia is ahead in the race for the Arctic and has for decades expanded its military presence here. Meanwhile, NATO has been focused elsewhere and is lagging behind. There is a legitimate fear in Western capitals that once the conflict in Ukraine dies down that maybe Russia will try and go for the High North. And one scenario would be to invade Finland, in which case Sweden would very quickly become part of the conflict. The Swedish soldiers would have to move over and help out. And then you would have guys like these American soldiers moving into Sweden to help secure this country. We're walking across this beautiful frozen lake on our way to the cold water exercise.

Do the cold water. When you start running, start taking off. If you have zippers up, open up the zippers because they're gonna freeze. If you have clothes, take it off. Run and make sure you get dried. As soon as you're up, you're fine. This is what they had to open up this morning. Then you will ask permission to enter the hole

Soldier 1: Permission to enter the hole? Can I exit the hole?

Denis: You can exit. And he's using the ski poles. And he's crawling like three meters.

For operating under these kind of conditions, we really, really need to know what happens to the human body when or if we actually go through the ice, the window of opportunity to actually be able to survive this is short. But if you have the right tools, it's not a problem.

Sune: Have you done it?

I've done it many times, yeah.

Sune: Do you do it for fun?

No, it's not fun.

I thought they were gonna like when they demonstrated it, it was gonna look easy 'cause they've done it so many times, but they were completely cold shocked. They could barely speak. Permission to enter the pool. Fucking hell.

Denis: Okay, nice and low, stay nice and low. Stand up, good.

Woo. Yep, let's go.

Denis: It wasn't that bad, right?

Sune: Oh, talk to me in five minutes.

Denis: Okay, okay.

I can't feel my legs or my feet.

Get some warm fluid in. Take a run, walk, come back, drink more.

Yep.

Soldier 2: There you go.

We're doing a skin on skin. My hands under Denis's armpits to warm them up.

How you doing?

Better. I hate you. Next we're going to camp out alone for a whole night. Using nature to build a shelter. Distances in the Arctic are vast and there's barely any infrastructure. So to do missions of any length you need to be able to survive outside on your own.

Your sleeping bag. It doesn't give you any heat, it just maintains the heat you already have. You want to create a gap between you and the snow and you can use bruise branches, pallets, lumber, your clothes, everything you can find, take you and isolate you from the ground. We have a saying in Danish and I will translate it . That means, "Take a shit before you go to sleep," otherwise your body has to warm up all the waste inside of you as well.

Sune: We set off on our skis into the forest to prepare our shelter for the night.

Once you go out there from the men's trail, you go 30 meters and that's where you find your campsite. Don't start looking for the perfect campsite. It doesn't exist.

So this is the beginning of my shelter and I've collected some wood, here as well make a fire and cook. Little more work to go, but we're getting there. So this here is my camp. I feel quite happy with it. My shelter this, where I'll be sleeping tonight, but I'm not gonna lie, I'm in a little bit of a crisis. I was gonna sit down and have a hot meal and then I discovered that my cooker has frozen over. Okay, I got a fire going and hopefully I'll be able to cook on this. Nope.

Denis: I bet you guys had a great night.

Soldier 3: Yeah building fires having a good time.

I think this is where the civilian was tested.

After returning to base, we were told that several soldiers had to be hospitalized because they'd gotten frostbite overnight. I was told one guy was at risk of losing parts of his toes because he had failed to change out of his sweaty socks. There have been a series of cold weather injuries, frostbite this year, on the course, two guys are still in the hospital receiving treatment. More than 10% of students are going home. Is that unusual?

This is the first time we have this falling short with students. Are we gonna stay inside when it's cold? Then we won't read the training objectives because people need to fight in the environment. So risk mitigation, whatever we do, it's gonna be a medium risk and we have to take control and implement training and monitoring the soldiers and follow up and do inspection checks.

With severe injuries hampering this training just days in. It's hard to imagine how any war can be fought here. I wanted to learn more about the prospect of arctic conflict from the US forces I'm embedding with, these trainings here, there's a lot more interest in like the past two or three years. Obviously because of the war in Ukraine and northern Scandinavia is quite concerned about Russian intentions here. Like is that something that you think about as well? That there's now a new enemy?

Sergeant: Not so much a new enemy, but I guess new friends and partners to help bear the load with and to train beside is how I would look at it.

Is it even possible to fight a war here?

Medic: We've certainly joked about that. Maybe all the countries come together and we just decide that this is, you know, "Above this line we're not fighting here." Yeah, we're not doing that.

Sune: So do you imagine this to become sort of part of your future?

Medic: Well, we don't have the global war on terror anymore. So what we were spending 20 years doing. I think there's just a lot more exposure to other things.

Sune: Adapting to this climate has been a huge learning curve for all of us during training. The soldiers I'm with here are confident with weapons, but even for them operating a gun here comes with a new set of challenges

Linus: Aiming at your enemy.

The problem with the gun is that it's made out of metal. Just touching it can give you a frostbite. You handle the weapon with gloves on?

Obviously, because it's cold of course.

But like thin gloves or-

As an actual protective measure, put tape on a lot of parts on a gun to prevent these kinds of injuries. It's able to take ice and still punch through the ice and work. One very bad thing that could happen is that you drop your weapon into the snow. Firing with ice in your barrel, with a really frozen barrel might actually break it.

Do you need to thaw it or-

Thaw it out inside.

Usually you need to go inside. What if you're on a seven day mission outside.

You're fucked.

Denis: All three poles and then when you see something, I'm gonna say contact front. You just drop your skis, take a weapon out, two shots. Contact front.

I think what this grueling training here has showed me is that when you talk about active warfare, the first thing you should think about is not warfare itself. It's simply just survival. I don't think any participants on this training course here are currently able to actually fight a war. They've been too concerned with just staying alive,

Denis: Contact front, drop the ski rods, weapon up.

But the truth is that as global competition continues here in the High North, Western allies might as well get used to the idea that the Arctic is going to become even more strategically important in the future.

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