Creating the Joint Arctic Command: Cutting Cost or Preparing for the Future? Strategic Culture, Arctic Security and Strategic Reasoning within the Kingdom of Denmark

Introduction

On 31 October, 2022, the Joint Arctic Command (JACO) of Danish Defence (the Danish Armed Forces) in Nuuk, Greenland, celebrated its 10-year anniversary. JACO plays a central role in Danish foreign and defence policy in the Arctic. With Greenland seeking increasingly independent policies, it is also a focal point in the ongoing debates between Greenland and Denmark over future Arctic strategies. Whereas Denmark is seeking a more capable military presence in the Arctic, Greenland has long advocated for a policy of non-militarization and de-armament as the route to a more secure environment. Therefore, it is not surprising that JACO should be the subject of much academic and political attention in the current security climate where the discourse of great power rivalry between Russia and the United States, or the West generally, is dominating. While it is too early to tell what the future shape and role of JACO will be, it is enlightening to investigate the rationales leading to the establishment of the Command in 2012.

Danish Defence’s Joint Arctic Command is a joint operational command comprising personnel from all branches of the Danish military: Navy, Air Force, Army and Special Forces. JACO was established as a fusion of the previous Greenland and Faroe Islands Commands in the period in which Danish military focus, previously directed to the Middle East, turned to the Arctic, echoing a global shift in attention in the mid-2000s. The first Arctic Strategy issued by the Kingdom of Denmark (2011) announced that the previous Faroe Islands Command and Greenland Command (established in 1961 and 1951 respectively) would be merged into a Joint Arctic Command on 31 October, 2012 and would have new headquarters in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk. Previously, the Faroe Islands Command was headquartered on Streymoy, while the Greenland Command had its headquarters in what was then known in Danish as Grønnedal (Kangilinnguit in Greenlandic), a former U.S. naval base established in 1942 as Bluie West Seven.

The prevailing perception in the literature, like the less-easily documented general perception in the Arctic scholarly and political community, is that the Joint Arctic Command was established to strengthen Denmark’s military presence in the Arctic. Playing the military part in an evolving Danish Arctic strategy, having an Arctic Command boosted the Arctic orientation of Danish foreign policy. Such a view corresponds with a rational actor approach, according to which the state is seen as making rational decisions preparing for a future Arctic with more traffic, activity and intensity in all kinds of relations – Denmark, that is, rationally acts in the context of a changing security environment. However, what we realised from the interviews we conducted, discussed below, was that the initial driver behind the creation of JACO was more a wish to cut military spending in the Arctic than it was a matter of strategic posturing in the Arctic. This insight, we suggest, contradicts the predominant understandings of the general military build-up in the Arctic as well as the political narratives surrounding Danish Arctic strategy. In order to make sense of this somewhat paradoxical decision – saving money at a time when the general focus was shifting to the Arctic– we employ the notion of strategic culture to emphasise the apparent solidity and slow-changing nature of established discourses in Danish strategy.

Methodology

As shown above, the existing analyses tend to explain the founding of JACO as arising from changes to the security environment, i.e. as a rational response to change. As an alternative, we try to highlight how deeply vested discourses and beliefs frame decisions in order to make sense of the strategic decisions, such as the establishment of JACO. Rather than assuming rational responses to strategic change, we employ strategic culture as a theoretical lens through which to understand Danish action in the Arctic. This draws our attention to the importance of cultural beliefs and norms at the national decision-making level for the making of decisions on defence matters. The concept of strategic culture, broadly defined as a set of common ideas concerning strategy found across institutions, helps us understand the significance of cultural codes framing strategic behaviour (Staun, 2021).

Empirically, we base our analysis on strategic documents and reports from working groups related to the Danish Armed Forces’ Arctic presence during the period under scrutiny. These are either publicly available or were provided to us by our interviewees (see below). We have also, although to a lesser degree, consulted contemporary news coverage to follow the debate about the establishment of JACO.

We have supplemented our desk study by conducting interviews with eight central stakeholders of the period, including the then-commanders of the Faroese and Greenland Commands and the current Chief of Defence, who served as the chairperson of the central working group planning the merger, as well as the former head of the Greenlandic government.¹ The first round of interviews (1–4) were conducted as semi-structured qualitative interviews using very broad and open questions to allow our informants to reflect on the process from their own perspective in retrospect. The second round (interviews 5–8) were more informal conversations mostly focusing on understanding the processes seen from Greenland. This ensured an explorative approach to the topic, assisted by increasingly narrow and focused questions from us. As the process of establishing the institution lay more than a decade before the interviews, we had to provide several of our informants with some basic knowledge to refresh their memories (dates, deadlines, composition of groups, etc.). We selected our interviewees from prior knowledge about the composition of working groups, organisations, and so on, based on their respective roles in the process.

We strove to foster a free dialogue during the process, and while they were conducted with full transparency as research interviews, we also promised that direct citations would be reviewed and confirmed by the interviewees prior to publication. This process did not result in any objections and only one minor clarification.

The article is structured as follows. In the first section, we provide a historical background on the presence of the Danish Armed Forces in Greenland and the Faroe Islands. This is followed by a brief introduction to strategic culture and how we employ the concept as theoretical guidance for better understanding the decisions on which the establishment of JACO was founded. This allows us to engage in the first analytical part of the article, in which we apply the concept of strategic culture to the Danish Arctic theatre. This, in turn, leads into our second analysis, in which we argue that the decision to establish JACO should be seen as a continuation of a specifically Danish strategic culture that can largely be described as a “merchant logic”, according to which Denmark sought to please NATO, and particularly the United States, enough to ensure security guarantees for the lowest possible cost. Finally, we sum up our findings in the conclusion.

Background

Today, the Kingdom of Denmark is constituted of three countries: Denmark, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands. Following the explorations of Erik the Red (ca. 950–1003), Greenland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands became part of the Norwegian sphere of influence throughout the Middle Ages. The union of Danmark–Norway, instituted in the 1380s, and the establishment of the Kalmar Union in 1397, which also included Sweden, created a large, networked Nordic polity reaching far out into the North Atlantic (Strandsbjerg, 2021, pp. 55–58). While Greenland was governed as a colony until 1953, the Faroe Islands’ status within the Danish state was that of a county from 1816 to 1948 when home rule was established. A constitutional revision in 1953 integrated Greenland into the Danish state with a status similar to that of a county. It is noteworthy that no referendum was held in Greenland at the time of transition from colonial rule, only in Denmark. Greenland obtained home rule in 1979 and self-government in 2009. While the local Greenlandic and Faroese governments have taken over numerous areas of societal responsibilities through the years, foreign policy, security and defence continue to be managed from Copenhagen (Ackrén, 2022; Gad, 2020).

From a military perspective, both Greenland and the Faroe Islands were of little importance prior to the middle of the 20th century. Danish warships patrolled in the North Atlantic as early as the 1600s, but only on occasional fishery inspections to deter foreign commercial interests from the Danish king’s waters. From the late 1800s, however, vessels from the Royal Danish Navy regularly patrolled the coastal areas of the sea around Greenland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands, and military assets participated in the exploration of Greenland during the first half of the 20th century (Dahlberg, 2019).

World War Two (1939–1945) played out rather differently in the various parts of the Kingdom of Denmark. While Denmark proper was occupied by Germany after brief fighting on 9 April, 1940, British forces landed on the Faroe Islands the following day after a direct order from Winston Churchill to prevent a German occupation. The British also occupied Iceland a month later, but in early July 1940 the United States, still a neutral country in the global conflict, took over the responsibility for protecting the otherwise unarmed island. Although protected by Britain, the Faroe Islands remained in the Kingdom throughout the war, while Iceland, having obtained self-rule in 1918, left the Danish monarchy in 1944 to become an independent republic (Larsen, 2020; Bjarnasson, 1972).

The United States also took over the responsibility for supporting and protecting the colony of Greenland after the German occupation of Denmark. On 9 April, 1941, the Danish ambassador to the United States signed an agreement on behalf of his government granting the United States the right to establishing a military presence in Greenland in return for providing support and security during the war. This agreement was reaffirmed with a treaty between Denmark and the United States signed in 1951, allowing for permanent U.S. bases in Greenland. Shortly afterwards, the Thule air base in North-Western Greenland was established. This facility became one of the most important U.S. military facilities during the Cold War, located on the grand polar route right between the superpowers (for a thorough history of Greenland during the first half of the Cold War, see DUPI, 1997).

As a founding member of NATO in 1949, Denmark reorganized its military system to align with the alliance in the early 1950s. The Greenland Command (GLK) was established at Grønnedal naval base in Kangilinngut on 1 August, 1951, replacing the initial Greenland Marine District in Nuuk in 1946. From 15 August, 1952, the GLK also functioned as NATO Island Command Greenland, part of the Allied Command Atlantic (ACLANT). The Faroes Marine District was established in Tórshavn on 5 September, 1951 and later transformed into the NATO Island Command Faroes (known in the Danish military system as Faroe Islands Command, or FRK), effective as of 1 June, 1961. This marked the foundation of the command structure, which lasted until the creation of the Joint Arctic Command in 2012 (see Jensen, 2011).

Danish military presence, however, remained light in Greenland and the Faroe Islands throughout the Cold War, mainly consisting of fishery inspection ships and cutters. Monitoring the GIUK Gap was a NATO priority. The alliance funded a NADGE radar for air surveillance on top of the Faroese mountain Sornfellí in the early 1960s (Larsen, 2020, p. 247), while the CANUS Distant Early Warning Line extended across Greenland, connecting with the short-lived H-2 and H-4 radar stations on Iceland in the 1960s together with airborne air surveillance based at Naval Air Station Keflavik. In the early 1990s, the NATO Infrastructure Fund covered the cost of four new radars in Iceland (Dahlberg, 2005, p. 183).

Theoretical Framework

We introduce the concept of strategic culture in order to understand the reasoning that applies to particular states’ strategic decision making, behaviour and defence posture. Focusing on strategic culture implies a conviction that not all states see the security environment the same way. Nor do they perceive the same threats in the same way. The tradition of analysing strategic culture grew out of U.S. attempts to understand Soviet reasoning and strategic posturing during the late 1970s. Snyder (1977) is typically referenced as beginning the debate (Neumann & Heikka, 2005; Staun, 2021). Even if different generations of theorising have been identified (Johnston, 1995), the core idea behind strategic culture remains that decision-making elites in different states are shaped by a particular perception of self within a particular understanding of the world, thus linking identity to Weltanschauung to strategic planning (Neumann & Heikka, 2005, p. 7). Strategic culture thus resonates with constructivist approaches to international relations. Proponents of positivist approaches have also sought to quantify and identify a possible causal relationship between strategic culture and state behaviour (Johnston, 1995). In this article, however, we are concerned with simply outlining a notion of strategic culture that serves as the context in which to understand state strategizing.

We define strategic culture as “leading discourses regarding strategy, which exist across central power elites in a given country” (Staun & Sørensen, 2023, p. 26). There are obviously challenges to such a view: how are these discourses to be identified, and how are they to be shown as, indeed, framing strategic planning? In this article, we are not making an independent study of strategic culture but, rather, drawing on those authors who have analyzed strategy within the Kingdom of Denmark. We employ this overall understanding of strategic culture to interpret the accounts of our interviewees and the white papers and background analysis laying out the establishment of JACO. There is a danger, of course, that this approach will see strategic culture as historically stable and unable to adapt to change in the strategic environment or external shocks. In the words of Neumann and Heikka, however:

This indicates that while strategic culture is not unchangeable, we should not expect rapid changes in strategic planning among states even when there are changes in the environment.² What we are interested in here is how continuation in strategic thinking is influencing decisions that might otherwise be perceived as a timely response to – in this case – Arctic security transformation.

Analysis 1: Danish Strategic Culture and the Arctic

The role of the United States in Danish security policy developed in the aftermath of World War Two. This was a period of dramatic re-orientation, with Denmark having to rethink its security position in the new world order. One established narrative about Danish defence policy emphasises the nation’s defeat in the Second Schleswig War in 1864 as the pivotal moment that turned Danish policy inwards and undermined the position of the military in Danish politics. For a great number of parliamentarians of different political stripes, defence spending came to seen as a futile waste of money facing European great powers (Mariager & Wivel, 2019). After 1945, however, with Greenland under U.S. influence and the island of Bornholm alarmingly close to the Soviet sphere, neutrality was no longer a lasting option for Denmark.

After World War Two, Danish grand strategy gradually adapted to the new world order – if not in a straightforward manner. In the years immediately after the war, it was an open question whether Denmark would want, or even be allowed, to join as a founding member of NATO. Denmark both debated neutrality in the shape of a West-leaning Nordic defence union and the ramifications of joining the Western alliance. Even after joining NATO, it took several years before any significant increase in Danish defence spending materialised (Lidegaard, 2020, p. 366). Hence, Danish strategic adaption to the post-war order followed two waypoints, not necessarily aligned. On the one hand, the military was rebuilt under the umbrella of U.S. leadership. During that process, the pre-war “what’s the point?” attitude was replaced by integration into the NATO alliance – and this was largely seen as an insurance ticket rather than a fully engaged partnership (Wivel, 2020, pp. 413–414).

On the other hand, it seemed as if, in the earliest years of the Cold War, Danish politicians tried to ignore U.S. demands that Denmark should show itself willing and able to defend its territory, thereby becoming a nation “allied with reservations” (Lidegaard, 2020, pp. 353–365; Villaume, 1995). In that sense, the government aimed to achieve its goal of insurance through the alliance without committing to it entirely. Here, we follow the thinking of the most established analyst of Danish military strategy, Peter Viggo Jakobsen, who bluntly notes that “changing governments and parliamentary majorities have, ever since Danish became a member of NATO in 1949, aimed to maintain the security guarantees of the alliance as cheaply as possible” (Jakobsen, 2023, our translation; see also Brøndum & Ringsmose, 2018). We term this strategic reasoning a “merchant logic” (“Get your insurance as cheaply as possible!”), in which the balance of international commitments and the domestic purse is weighed in favour of the purse (see also Jakobsen, 2020).

In this process, Greenland, being essential for U.S. interests, played a very important role in the development of Denmark’s alliance policies. Losing the use of Greenland was not an option for the United States. At the same time, the Danish position, and hope, was that the United States should leave Greenland after the war (Lidegaard, 2020, pp. 353–382). Denmark gradually realised that the United States was not going to give up its base rights in Greenland, and consequently relinquished its demands that it should leave Greenland entirely. Instead, Denmark tried to save money on its commitments to the alliance based on the idea that access to Greenland would both please the United States and afford Denmark economic benefits (Henriksen & Rahbek-Clemmensen, 2017). The conditions of this strategy changed with the end of the Cold War and the declaration of the Arctic as a zone of peace by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 (see Åtland, 2008).

Analysis 2: Establishing the Joint Arctic Command

When the decision to establish the new headquarters of the Joint Arctic Command reached the wider public with the publication of Arctic Strategy of the Kingdom of Denmark 2011–2020, the plan was portrayed as being part of four initiatives intended to strengthen the focus on the tasks of the Danish Armed Forces in the Arctic (UM, UD & UM 2011, p. 20). The strategy described the establishment of JACO as a rationalisation of the North Atlantic Command structure by merging the Faroese and Greenlandic commands. The other three initiatives were the establishment of an Arctic Response Force (Arktisk indsatsstyrke), conducting risk assessment for the maritime environment around Greenland due to the expected increase in maritime activity, and, finally, to produce a comprehensive analysis of future tasks for the Danish Ministry of Defence in the Arctic.

Now; two things are worth emphasizing. First, even though JACO is described as a rationalisation made in pursuit of a more efficient command structure, the strategy does not give the impression that JACO was established in order to free up substantial resources to fund the international commitments of the armed forces. Second, JACO’s establishment preceded the strategic analysis of the Arctic theatre – that is, JACO did not result from a strategic analysis of the future demands of the Arctic; the strategic analysis came after organizational change, not before. In the remainder of the article, we will discuss these two important points in the context of Danish strategic culture.

The decision to close down the previous Faroese and Greenlandic commands was announced in the Danish Defence Agreement 2010–2014, which included a “Special note on Greenland and the Arctic”:

At this time, the decision to establish the new headquarters was not yet taken – or at least not made public. We also note that there is an opening for involving Thule Air Base (now Pituffik Space Base) and other countries in the defence tasks around Greenland.

Danish media picked up the story from the defence agreement. On 14 July, 2009, several news outlets ran a story under the headline “Danish military build-up in the Arctic” (For example, Berlingske & Ejsing, 2009; DR & Vigsø, 2009); a week before, the Greenlandic public broadcaster KNR featured an interview with then-premier Kuupik Kleist praising rearmament for also improving emergency preparedness (KNR, 2009). Internationally, the same story was circulating. The BBC, for example, ran a brief story under the headline “Denmark plans forces for Arctic” linking the plans to set up the joint-service Arctic Command with the increasing activity in the region entailing “more tasks for the Danish Armed Forces” (BBC, 2009). This marked a (largely unnoticed) change in news coverage compared to a news article from August 2007 (less than a month after the notorious Russian flag-planting on the seabed of the North Pole) revealing that Danish Defence had recommended operational planning in Nuuk and Tórshavn to be discontinued. Instead, operations should be run from Denmark in order to save money (Brøndum, 2007). What did not feature in this article was the background for why costs needed to be cut.

In 2011, the Defence Command issued the first comprehensive, or structural, analysis of a possible location of new headquarters for what was called “a Joint Arctic Command” (Forsvarskommandoen, 2011). Referring to a previous analysis produced by the Defence Command in 2006 (Forsvarskommandoen 2006), this report recommended taking operational planning home to Denmark while maintaining the same level of activity without taking into account factors changing the political environment. The 2011 report listed three alternate locations for a new command in Greenland: Kangilinnguit, Nuuk, and Narsarsuaq, another former U.S. air base in the south. A report published by the Danish Institute for Military Studies (DIMS) in 2009 recommended moving the Greenlandic command to Nuuk – also in case the decision was made to merge the two Danish North Atlantic commands – in order to ensure knowledge of the special climatic, geographic, and maritime conditions surrounding Greenland (Jørgensen & Rahbek-Clemmensen, 2009).

Cutting cost or preparing for the future?

While very little discussion about the rationale behind establishing the Joint Arctic Command can be found in the media or in the publicly available documents, our interviewees provide very clear statements that money-saving was the driver. Prior to Henrik Kudsk’s takeover as commander in Greenland in 2007, the idea of merging Greenland and Faroe Islands Command had repeatedly been on the agenda as a potential cost-cutting exercise envisioned by both the Defence Command and the Ministry of Defence (interview 1). Closing down the command was considered as far back as 2004, in the build-up to the previous defence agreement (interview 4). In 2008 there was “a very clear mandate to save money in order to finance the campaign in Afghanistan” (interview 4), and the aim was to save as much as one-third of the overall military budget for the Faroe Islands and Greenland (interview 3), primarily achieved through staff reduction and selling property. In light of the previous discussion on strategic culture this is interesting: it underlines that Danish defence priorities followed those of the United States and the necessity of engaging internationally to such an extent that military presence in the Arctic – then a low-priority to Denmark’s most important ally – was seen as a very low priority. The Arctic as a theatre was perceived to be drawing funds away from Afghanistan (interview 4). “We had our eyes firmly set on Afghanistan back then, not the Arctic,” Flemming Lentfer recalls (interview 2).

As the former Faroese commander Per Starklint puts it, the timing of these processes meant that the MoD implemented savings at the same time as the strategic importance of the Arctic was on the rise. Various strategic analyses presented in official documents from Danish Defence in the years leading up to the establishment of JACO were vague on the Arctic, apart from forecasting increased activity in the region. Thus, changes in the strategic environment where not what led to the establishment of JACO. As already mentioned, it was only after 2012 that the big strategic analysis was initiated by the Working Group on the Future Tasks of the Danish Ministry of Defence in the Arctic (Arbejdsgruppen vedr. styrkelse af Forsvarsministeriets opgaveløsning i Arktis) with the mandate to strengthen the armed forces in the region. This decision was made in December 2013 (Forsvarsministeriet, 2016). It had taken six months to agree on the wording of the commission, however, and from the outset, it was very clear that the Ministry of Finance was keen to avoid any conclusions that would increase the costs (interview 4).

With regard to this large-scale strategic analysis, we thus appear to see a continuation of the merchant logic with regard to the willingness to spend. It was only after Crimea in 2014 (interviews 2 and 4) that a willingness to invest substantially more can be identified. And even so, the first set of recommendations concluding the report stays within the confines of a very limited 120 million kroner (€16 million). In this light, the establishment of JACO should again be seen as a continuation of a merchant logic characterising Danish strategic culture rather than as resulting from strategic foresight in Danish Arctic security politics.

There is also a wide agreement that it made sense to relocate the Greenlandic command, especially. Henrik Kudsk (interview 1) recalls that when he came to Greenland, he basically found “an office with an operations centre attached located at the bottom of a Greenlandic fjord,” which required Danish Defence to run an entire society including electricity and water supply in order to support a relatively small military presence. Grønnedal used to be a functional naval station, but it had not operated as such for decades when plans to move activities to Nuuk began to emerge. 2007 marked a period of growing Arctic awareness in the Danish MFA; from being “a corner of the world,” Greenland became central to numerous interests; the Kingdom of Denmark began to play a more important international role both as a member of the Arctic Council from 1996 and as one of the A5 coastal states.⁶ This meant that international attention and an increasingly assertive Greenlandic political scene demanding more influence on foreign policy led to more meetings for the Greenland commander and his staff. In consequence, the location of Grønnedal became increasingly problematic as the only means of transportation in and out of the fjord was by helicopter or ship. One of our interviewees describes how a two-hour meeting in Nuuk or Copenhagen easily required one or two weeks of absence due to the extended travel time (interview. 1).

The decision to establish JACO coincided more or less with negotiations on the new law on Greenlandic self-rule that took effect on 21 June, 2009. However according to several of our interviewees (interviews 1 and 3) the two processes concerning JACO and self-rule were entirely unrelated. From our interviews we get a clear sense that the decision to establish JACO was internal to the defence community. It was “a political non-decision” (interview 5) in the Danish Folketing, carrying no political controversy. There was, likewise, little disagreement in the Greenlandic parliament on moving the command to Nuuk (interview 7). The premier of Greenland at the time, Kuupik Kleist, even praised the decision in a news interview (KNR, 2009).

On a local political level, however, there was some resistance to the move from Kangilinnguit to Nuuk, but this arose from a different process – the merger of municipalities in Greenland in order to create larger and more efficient administrative entities. In 2008, the mayors of Ivittuut, Paamiut, and Nuuk agreed to merge. This generated some resistance in Grønnedal (Kangilinnguit) because (some) residents were concerned about their comparably privileged life and low tax levels as part of Ivittuut municipality. The decision to merge meant that it was already decided that Kangilinnguit was going to be part of the same grand municipality as Nuuk, the current Kommuneqarfik Sermersooq, when the relocation of the command began (interview 6). Thus, even though the development of home rule and municipal reform in Greenland were unrelated to the decisions leading to JACO, these political processes served to underline the need for a military presence in Nuuk close to the political and civil authorities; the Danish Armed Forces increasingly needed to interact with these authorities as the world’s attention began to turn towards the Arctic.

Conclusion

How are we to understand the establishment of the Danish Joint Arctic Command in Greenland within the wider context of strategic transformation in the Arctic? First, we find that the merging of the Greenland and Faroe Islands Commands into the Joint Arctic Command did not arise from a strategic analysis envisioning a need for a stronger military presence in the Arctic; it was, rather, an adaption to a post-Cold War global order led by the United States emphasising the need to fight asymmetrical wars. The United States and NATO paid so little attention to the Arctic that Greenland lost its strategic significance for the United States; the NATO air surveillance radar on Sornfellí mountain was removed in 2007 (Larsen, 2020). Within this logic, it made sense to reduce military spending in the Arctic in in order to free up funds for the engagement in Afghanistan. Second, the strategic analysis that followed 2012 was – at least at its outset – highly constrained financially. There was no willingness to spend more on the Danish Armed Forces in the Arctic. As such, the creation of JACO, we suggest, represented a continuation of Danish strategic culture rather than a change in the Arctic security environment.

Even if we do not necessarily see a dichotomous relationship between strategic foresight and cost cutting, our findings demonstrate that that the primary driver in creating JACO was to cut spending. To the extent that we can speak of strategic foresight in terms of coping with a more challenging Arctic, this foresight both emerged after the decision to cut costs and materialised initially as a strategy of getting more out of less money (the rationalisation argument). That is, the ambition of a stronger Arctic posture was not accompanied with a willingness to spend more on defence in the Arctic.

According to the last chiefs of the Faroese and Greenlandic commands, the rationalisation was carried out rather successfully in that they did not experience any reduction in operational capacity. And the relocation to Nuuk increased “connectivity” with local political structures and the civilian authorities located in the Greenlandic capital improving a key raison d’être at the time: search and rescue (SAR) and other support functions to civilian society. At this time, Arctic SAR was a main concern also reflected in the fact that the first binding agreement made by the Arctic Council in 2011 was indeed on SAR, while in the early days from 2012, JACO was preoccupied with establishing a proper Joint Rescue Coordination Centre (interview 8). Today we see a different logic seeking to enhance the military weight and international defence cooperation of JACO. The coast guards of France, Canada and the United States are frequent visitors, while NORAD is seeking to modernise its defence of North America, which has consequences for Greenland. Thus, even if JACO was the result of cutting costs, the unity of command that came out of the merger prepared Danish Defence well for the great power rivalry and attention that followed in the Arctic.

As political perceptions of Arctic security began to alter with the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, purse strings were still tight. Apart from a not-yet implemented Arctic Capability Package of 2021 aiming to increase surveillance capability, no substantial funds were targeted to the Arctic until the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The invasion led, however, to the decision in June 2023 to significantly increase Danish defence spending, highlighting the Arctic as one of the Kingdom’s key strategic priorities (Forsvarsministeriet, 2023, Krog, 2023). In many ways, this represents a U-turn in comparison with the decisions leading to the establishment of JACO. It remains to be seen, however, whether this new willingness to spend should be considered a change in the strategic assessment of the Arctic, or whether it will simply represent a continuation of a strategic culture of following the lead of the United States. In any case, following the literature on strategic culture discussed previously, we should expect changes in Danish strategic culture to happen slowly as a gradual adaptation to a changing environment. A final significant aspect to consider, which goes far beyond the scope of this article, is an altered political dynamic on defence within the Kingdom of Denmark due to the Faroe Islands’ and Greenland’s assertive demands to be involved in any decision that affects the two countries, clearly signified by the title of Greenland’s new (2024) foreign policy strategy: “Nothing about us, without us”. This might challenge Denmark’s strategic culture, as the Greenlandic and the Faroese governments will become more directly involved in the defence agreement negotiations.

List of informants

1. Henrik Kudsk, last commander of GLK.

2. Flemming Lentfer, current Chief of Defence. Previously chief of Defence Command planning 2011–14.

3. Per Starklint, last commander of FRK.

4. Kim Jesper Jørgensen played a central role in drafting the defence agreement 2005–2009. Head of the Ministry of Defence’s Arctic Project Organization 2014–2016. Served as Commander of JACO 2016–2020. Current chief of the Danish Ministry of Defence Acquisition and Logistics Organisation (DALO).

5. Julie Rademacher is a former member of the Danish parliament (2007–2011). She currently serves as the Chief of Communications at the Greenlandic communications company Tusass.

6. Asii Chemnitz Narup is a former mayor of Nuuk Municipality and later Kommuneqarfik Sermersooq. Currently a member of the Greenlandic parliament where she sits on the Foreign and Security Policy Committee for Inuit Ataqatigiit (IA).

7. Kuupik Kleist was premier of the first Greenlandic government after self-rule was introduced (2009–2013).

8. Michael Hjort, head of J7 (Exercises, Training and Education) at JACO at the time of interview. Previously Chief of JOC/JRCC having served in Greenland and the Faroe Islands since 2010.

Funding Information

The article has developed in continuation of the “New Nordic Network on Arctic Security Strategy” funded by NordForsk Project no. 127307.

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests to declare.