A Once-Vital Remote Island Asset is in the Geo-Political Crosshairs Again

This article, commissioned but never published by a national magazine, is largely based on reporting done in 2022. It should be taken as a snapshot in time.

Adak, Alaska, sits halfway out the Aleutian chain, due north of Samoa and closer to Russia than to Anchorage. It is about the size of Dominica and likewise volcanic, but otherwise a very different island: a place of punishing weather, stunning wild beauty, and dystopic human ruins. With a permanent population that’s fallen from a few hundred to a few dozen, it is also the most remote and most improbable incorporated city in the United States.

For six decades, through two global wars, Adak was a vital defense outpost. In 1942, in a bloody, largely forgotten mini-war against Japanese invaders, Adak-based soldiers and pilots unseated the first foreign occupation of U.S. territory since 1814. Through nearly five ensuing decades Adak’s nuclear-armed forces stood guard against Soviet machinations in the Arctic and North Pacific.

Post-Cold War, the island became a cherished prize and heavy burden for the native Aleut Corporation, whose members’ parents and grandparents were forced from it and other Bering Sea islands by their own government in the 1940s. It’s since become home to a quintessentially Alaskan cross-section of military retirees, frontier entrepreneurs, and get-away–from–it-all homesteaders struggling to build a cozy community and economic powerhouse at the edge of the world.

Now Adak’s strategic position, deep-water harbor, and spacious airfield have put it in the geopolitical crosshairs again. For several years running, joint Chinese and Russian naval task forces have cruised nearby waters. Generals and politicians are scrambling to respond to escalating superpower tensions and Moscow’s and Beijing’s swelling Arctic ambitions. Even as its contractors labor to clean up the 60 years’ worth of waste and explosives it left behind, the military is weighing whether to return to Adak. Some locals think it’s already coming back.

No one imagines another full-scale military occupation; such a move today would be politically and legally incendiary and fearsomely expensive. In 2018, when Navy Secretary Richard Spencer asked his number crunchers what it would cost to “reactivate” the Adak base, the number left him “gobsmacked”: $1.3 billion. But, as he afterward told Breaking Defense, a smaller presence, using rented lodging and existing air facilities, “really [wouldn’t be] a big bill.”

It would still be a big boost to the island’s struggling economy. Those facilities, plus vast waterfront warehouses left behind by the Navy, can also serve another mission: processing and shipping the fish and crab that abound in the waters around the Aleutians. Those fisheries have been post-military Adak’s great economic hope and, in good years, its mainstay.

But they’ve also interjected it into a commercial, legal and political conflict with as many twists and turns as superpower competition: Alaska’s fish wars. The latest twist, two years ago, sent the new Adak into a spiral, raising the question: will anyone be there to receive the gobs and leathernecks if and when they finally arrive?

“Welcome to N.A.F. Adak, Alaska/Birthplace of the Winds,” reads the sign greeting passengers on the twice-weekly Alaska Airways flights from Anchorage. The first time I arrived, in 2003, it read simply “the Winds”; the winds had blown away the rest of it. Like so much on the island, it’s been patched back together.

Beyond the terminal lies a spectacle out of Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles: suburban housing tracts miraculously transported to a treeless tundra landscape that’s more Mars than Shady Grove, USA.

Hundreds—no one seems to know exactly how many—of the cookie-cutter houses and duplexes where officers, airmen, and their families lived line the smooth asphalt lanes and horseshoe courts. Here and there, pickups and SUVs sit outside tidy homes and neatly mown lawns. Elsewhere a neutron bomb might have hit; the bear grass and dwarf lupines grow rampant, burnt-out walls gape, and peeling siding flaps in the wind.

The low-slung 1960s ranch units of Kuluk, the oldest subdivision, have held up best. Newer two-story townhouses, supposedly diverted on their way to Hawaii, have solariums for whatever sun breaks through the fog. The weirdest units, stackable modulars in 1970s yellow and brown, look like stranded campers or intergalactic shipping containers. They’re the leakiest and least inhabited.

Uphill and beyond salvaging, on a long ridge called Bering Hill, are crumbling apartment and dormitory blocks for enlisted men and women that recall bombed-out Ukrainian towns. Beside them a quaint wooden church is fast decaying, but a sharply angled modernist church juts like a warship’s prow over the tundra; it now serves as a tsunami refuge. Scattered through the hills beyond are gloomy bunkers, cryptically twisted metal frames, and improbably sited heaps of rusting vehicles, stoves, washers, even candy-colored
plastic playground ponies. The base McDonald’s still stands, its drive-up menu frozen in an era of 99 cent burgers and 25 cent coffee.

After three decades of cleanup, one ominous feature is gone from the back roads and tundra trails: signs warning, “DANGER: Unexploded Ordnance.” But they’re packed away in some hangar, ready to be redeployed if anyone ever shoots the zombie-apocalypse flick this setting cries for. “A hundred percent of the locals wonder why that hasn’t happened,” said Lyndell Tulimaseali, who drives the fuel truck that supplies Adak’s homes with costly heating oil, as he gave me a lift. “It’s definitely the place for that kind of show.”

Instead, Netflix filmed a hyped-up reality TV series about treasure hunters digging for the supposed Pirate Gold of Adak Island. The show likely introduced more people worldwide to Adak than any attention ever had. But it didn’t find any gold: “If there were any, we would have found it,” said Jake Jacobsen, an explosives expert who hunted UXO (unexploded ordnance) on Adak in the 1990s and now returns to hunt caribou. “We dug up half the island.”

For more than 4,000 (some say 9,000) years, the Aleut or, as they called themselves, Unangax people lived lightly on the Aleutian chain and nearby mainland. The outside world intruded in the 1740s in the form of Russian mariners led by the Danish Vitus Bering. Fur hunters, traders, and overseers followed, bringing the usual colonial gifts: Christianity, intermarriage, Western technology, massacres, and serfdom.

“Talk to any Aleut,” Elaine Smiloff, an Aleut corporation member, who was one of the first to move to Adak and buy an empty base house, told me as strings of salmon dried in her living room and Navy swamp-mat timbers crackled in her wood stove. “They have figured out, no matter what you throw at them, how to survive.”

The Unangax were put to that test again after the United States succeeded Russia as the colonial power. In June 1942, Japanese forces seized the westernmost Aleutian islands, Attu and Kiska. U.S. authorities hastily evacuated 881 Aleut villagers from Adak and the other Aleutian and, to the north, Pribilof Islands. They warehoused these villagers in decrepit mainland sites (a gold mine, abandoned salmon canneries) with bad
water, meager rations, and scanty medical care. Most sickened; dozens died of measles, pneumonia and tuberculosis. Soldiers trashed, looted, even torched their homes. Nonnative residents were meanwhile allowed to stay on the islands.

U.S. forces desperately needed a base, in particular an airstrip, to attack occupied Attu and Kiska. The Japanese had deemed it unfeasible to build one on Adak, but Navy Seabees proved them wrong; in ten days they dammed, drained, and bulldozed a lagoon, covered the marshy ground with steel Marston mats, and received the first flights in Adak’s history.
The year-long “forgotten war” that followed was one of the most grueling, bloody campaigns in the Pacific.

Some 32,000 soldiers, ill-clothed for the chill and damp, occupied tents and Quonset huts on Adak. Another 60,000 joined the final attack. Battlefield casualties were high, but a muskeg version of trench foot incapacitated even more soldiers. Some soldiers went bonkers—“Adaky whacky” in the local parlance—and many more chafed at the isolation and harsh conditions: “There’s a woman behind every tree in the Aleutians,” went the joke, but of course there were no trees.

One who didn’t complain was Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon and creator of the hard-boiled detective genre, who at age 48 enlisted in the Army. Posted to Adak, Corporal Hammett reveled in the “stark beauty” and spartan life. “I’m the only one who ever really saw it,” he wrote a friend. “The footing was poor, and the GIs walked with their heads down, afraid of slipping. I looked up and saw such mountains and lakes as no other place can match.” After the war he tried to persuade his lover, the playwright Lillian Hellman, to move to Adak. She was aghast.

The Aleutian war ended in a banzai charge by Attu’s last defenders and a stealth evacuation by the Kiska garrison, leaving the GIs to fire at each other in the fog. Afterward, all but a skeleton force departed. The Navy transferred Adak to the Air Force, which handed it back to the Navy in 1950.

Then the island’s military footprint and importance grew again, as the Cold War took to the skies and seas. From Adak, P3 fighters, the Navy’s premier sub-chasers, patrolled the frigid waters. Locals call the half-buried bunkers where their nuclear depth charges were stored the Seven Doors of Doom. No one seems to fear them now. “We used to keep our trucks up there,” one of the UXO contractors told me.

The base had all the comforts: clubs and restaurants, a movie house, bowling alley, and Olympic pool, and a ski lodge on nearby Mount Moffett. In the late 1950s officials released 23 caribou (which are not native to the Aleutians) to give the servicemen something to shoot at. They proliferated, providing diversion and fresh steaks.

One Christmas the Morale, Welfare and Recreation program distributed a thousand small spruce trees. Those planted in the base’s fill dirt perished, but others thrive outside town, though stunted by the nitrogen-poor tundra soil. The biggest little grove (with a rustic sign reading “Adak National Forest”) grows beside the base’s K-9 cemetery, near a secret triple-gated bunker that once housed the electronic spying center for the entire North Pacific. No doubt those lonesome GIs would be pleased to know there are now some trees in the Aleutians.

By 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, more than 6,000 service members and dependents lived at Naval Air Station Adak. If it were a city, it would have been Alaska’s sixth-largest. By 1997, they were gone. In the heady days of peace dividends, Adak landed on the Base Realignment Commission’s chopping block. The Navy holdings reverted to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, which manages most of the Aleutians (including Adak’s roadless south side) as a wildlife refuge.

But the Aleut Corporation, one of 13 native regional corporations established under the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, saw an opportunity. It traded unoccupied islands elsewhere, with their mineral rights, to FWS for the base and lands around it, gaining $493 million in tax deductions.

The Navy’s evacuation started orderly and ended pell-mell. Stoves, washers, and refrigerators were packed by the hundreds into a vast hangar: the Tomb of the Unknown Major Appliance. The old control tower was left unlocked, heaped and strewn with air maps, manuals, and other files. Ten-pins still stand racked in the bowling alley, as though the bowlers stepped out for a beer. “We found drawers of personnel files with social security numbers,” recalled Layton Lockett, until 2021 Adak’s city manager. “I guess they did the same thing in Afghanistan.”

“The Navy was not happy when they had to turn it over to the Aleut Corporation,” Smiloff said. “They clogged up every sewer drain. They didn’t winterize the houses. Still, we got our land back without killing anyone.”

The problem, corporation president Skoey Vergen told me, is what’s under that land. The deeds include covenants variously restricting or forbidding excavation, construction, and using groundwater in the occupied base area and outside landfill and disposal sites, even after cleanup. Those might sound like safety precautions, but “we suspect a lot more is buried there,” said Vergen. “Why were subsurface rights withheld? It doesn’t make sense unless they’re trying to hide something. I believe the Aleut Corporation as naïve in accepting the transfer on the terms offered.”

Vergen concedes the Navy has done “a decent job” of uncovering and removing buried ordnance. All but one still-restricted sector of the island is now deemed safe (but watch out for embedded “Rommel stakes” when you go hiking). The Navy expects to finish de-bombing and complete its petrochemical cleanup around 2024. Coordinator Christopher Generous said it’s spent $424 million on cleanup through fiscal 2022, with another $50 million to go.

From such inauspicious beginnings, a tightknit, tenacious community grew, though Aleut residents now compose just a small minority. Their neighbors wash up from almost anywhere. Emmitt Raymond, a master of many trades, was shrimping out of Corpus Christi, Texas when he got invited to run a fish-processing plant in Petersburg, Alaska. After working on various plants and fishing boats, he wound up fixing the Adak plant’s refrigeration system, then running other operations there. “The main reason I stick around is, I’m the one who can start that plant up again,” he told me.

His buddy Daniel Liebelt, formerly a soldier in the German and American armies, helps manage the airport for the FAA. “I love it up here,” he exulted, “There’s plenty of
space, it’s the last place where you can do what you want. “The
community pulls together. We take care of each other.” (With fresh meat otherwise unavailable, he and an Aleut colleague bring caribou to neighbors who can’t hunt themselves.) You hear such dual sentiments a lot on Adak.

Samoa-born Tulimaseali arrived about six years ago to work in the fish plant. “I hated it,” he recalled with a laugh. “But I met a girl who grew up here. I invited her to Anchorage, but instead I moved back here to join her.” Now, he said, “I love the solitude, love the landscape. I go to Anchorage and after three days, whoa, I miss Adak.”

Even for a visitor, there’s a weirdly comforting blend of isolation and intimacy, seclusion and solidarity, in a mostly empty city surrounded by thousands of square miles of volcano-specked seas where everybody knows your name. It keeps people coming back. They call it “the Adak bug.”

Big ideas and bright prospects for repurposing Adak have beckoned from the first. It would ship tankers full of fresh water to thirsty Asian cities. It would become an intercontinental transshipment hub, a support base for offshore Arctic oil drilling, or a strategic oil storage depot, as Alaska’s Gov. Mike Dunleavy urges.

Or maybe even a spaceport? In summer 2022, NASA landed and launched its WB-57f high-altitude aircraft, used for atmospheric monitoring, on Adak, and with it launched a wave of rumors: “They’re looking to get a full station out here,” said Liebelt, who worked with the NASA crew. “They love Adak. There’s no other place in the United States that’s so remote, and because the weather is so harsh on their equipment they can test it for everything.”

That may be wishful thinking on the pilots’ part. Paul Newman, the NASA scientist leading the monitoring project, told me that while “a movement is afoot to establish more monitoring stations around the world,” the 2022 transit was a one-off: The WB-57 doesn’t have enough range to cross the Pacific, so it refueled at Anchorage and Adak on the way to its South Korean launch site. Oil-port ambitions crashed when Shell nixed its Arctic drilling plans. Other big dreams have remained dreams.

Meanwhile, a small but steady flow of hikers, photographers, and other venturesome visitors provide some cash flow. Probably the most numerous, certainly the most conspicuous and controversial, are camo-clad hunters drawn by Adak’s invasive caribou, with no off season or bag limit for cows. Locals blame trophy hunters for depleting the herds and driving them from nearby hills to the island’s remote, roadless south end. “They’re taking food away from the people who live here,” Liebelt lamented. He said
he’s seen 28 killed by one hunting party and, with Raymond, found a whole carcass abandoned with only the horns taken—illegal “wanton waste” under Alaska law.

Birders come, sometimes on small cruise boats, drawn by the more than 200 species that live or land on the island, including rarely seen Asian species. (Only visitors could love the “trash eagles” that dart into open truck windows seeking snacks. If disappointed, they may rip the seats apart.) I met a young couple from Anchorage (he works in tech, she at a nonprofit) who came on a lark, drawn by Alaska Airlines low mileage fares (cash tickets are pricey). They reveled in the island’s beauty and strangeness and even attended a city council meeting. The Adak bug had struck again.

A Sausalito-based outfit called Valor Tours brings small “expeditions” of history buffs and the offspring of World War II servicemen to Adak and, when a boat’s available, other islands. “It’s a magical place,” said Floridian Karen Abel, who’s led the tours since 2015. “People tell me it’s like nothing they’ve ever seen. I really think Adak could have a tourism industry.”

So far, however, tourism is an economic sideshow. Adak’s main chance is fish. When the Navy pulled out, a Norwegian entrepreneur turned a vast dockside warehouse left behind into a fish-processing plant. It provided a welcome market for fishermen who otherwise would spend time and fuel chugging to Dutch Harbor, 450 stormy miles east, to unload their Pacific cod, crab, halibut, and sablefish. But the plant struggled with debt, high operating costs, and uncertain fish supplies, and finally declared bankruptcy. Other operators tried to run it and gave up.

Meanwhile, warming waters and other environmental challenges hammered crab and other stocks in Alaska’s seafood breadbasket, the relatively shallow eastern Bering Sea. That’s made the Aleutians’ deeper waters increasingly attractive to Seattle’s fleet of big, highly efficient catcher-processors (a.k.a. “factory trawlers”)—bringing outsized competition for shore-based plants like Adak’s.

The Aleut Corporation and city-chartered Adak Community Development Corporation begged for protection in the form of a guaranteed cod allocation, arguing that the plant needs that baseline to stay open and process the pricier but smaller-scale catches for which Adak does have allotments. The federally chartered North Pacific Fishery Management Council agreed and set aside a little under 3 percent of the combined Bering-Aleutian cod harvest for shore-based plants in the Western Aleutians—in effect, for Adak.

Buoyed by that assurance, Canada-based Golden Harvest Alaska Seafoods took over and invested millions in new equipment, some of it still sitting unpacked—“German, the best quality,” Emmitt Raymond noted as he showed visitors around the now-silent plant. Its 300 employees, 80 of them year-round, recharged the town’s population, which had dropped below 100.

Every boom has its downside. Drugs and crime followed; plant workers smoked meth to perform grueling double shifts. Some vandalized and torched empty houses. But the city devised a painless way to eliminate miscreants: instead of arrest, a free ticket to the mainland if they agreed never to return. And yet, with a fifth to third of city taxes coming from the plant, Adak prospered.

Then it succumbed to Alaska’s fishing wars, in particular the long-running contest between small coastal communities and Seattle’s billion-dollar industry. The factory-trawler operators sued, Adak lost its vital cod allocation, and in 2020 Golden Harvest pulled out, leaving some fishermen unpaid for their catches.

“For them it’s a growth strategy,” sighed Steve Minor, who’s lobbied for Golden Harvest and Adak and managed business development for a potential new plant operator. “For us, it’s life and death.” Minor and other Adak advocates appealed for help to Alaska’s congressional delegation but they say Washington’s Sen. Maria Cantwell, who chairs the committee overseeing fisheries, blocked the way. Cantwell’s office and committee staff did not respond to requests for comment.

The island’s population meanwhile plummeted to just 33 fulltime, year-round residents in 2022, plus temporary cleanup contractors and residents who’ve left to work on the mainland but kept their houses. Families with children: zero; the all-grades school remains closed. It’s a vicious circle, said Mandy Hawes, the Aleut Corporation’s COO: “Without that engine of the fish plant and military activity, it’s very difficult to support families. When families move off the island, the school can’t stay open. Without a school, it’s difficult to attract families….”

Scott Bullock is a leading local property investor and lodging provider; he and his partner’s “Aleutian Outfitters” signs are ubiquitous on fixed-up houses around town, and they even own the rec center and bowling alley. “This is the first year we haven’t invested in Adak,” he said in 2022.

While Adak struggled, the world changed around it. Public, political and Pentagon attention on the Arctic had long flagged, despite the efforts of Alaska’s congressional delegation, in particular its junior senator, Dan Sullivan, to rekindle it. As one specialist attached to the Joint Chiefs of Staff noted, “their voices and those of military leaders familiar with the theater have seemed trapped in an echo chamber”—until a recent “renewed surge of strategic competition narratives.”

Russia, with 46 icebreakers to America’s five, meanwhile kept building Arctic bases and staging displays of force and probes of American and NATO defenses. In 2020 The U.S. Air Force intercepted more than 60 Russian jets—a record number—penetrating or skirting the North American Air Defense Identification Zone, some of them flying over the Aleutians. Russian bomber formations came within 32 miles of the Alaskan coast.

In 2013, China, a self-proclaimed “near-Arctic nation” though it has no Arctic territory or history, secured permanent observer status on the Arctic Council, where Arctic nations broker their disputes. In 2018 China announced a “Polar Silk Road” initiative to develop the region. In August 2021, U.S. Coast Guard cutters encountered a four-vessel Chinese naval task force, led by a guided-missile cruiser, near the Aleutians.

On September 19, 2022, another cruiser-led force sailed through Amchitka Pass, 130 miles west of Adak, with a difference: It included four Russian as well as three Chinese vessels, one of them a destroyer—apparently the first such joint Chinese-Russian show of force in the region, and a sign of growing cooperation between the two powers.

The Coast Guard cutter U.S. Kimball shadowed that task force, but the U.S. military and administration otherwise did not respond, and the national media took no note. Sullivan deplored that “tepid” reaction and, he recounted when I spoke with him in late 2022, urging “a much more robust response” should the Chinese and Russians cruise Alaskan waters again. In late July 2023 they did, with an even larger task force—11 warships, according to the Wall Street Journal. This time the U.S. Navy dispatched four destroyers to counter them, and the incident was headline news.

Like Cato declaiming “Carthago delenda est” to the Roman Senate, Sullivan has sounded his refrain since entering the U.S. Senate in 2015: The Arctic is critical to American security. Especially Adak. His view, he told me, derives “110 percent” from his experience serving in a Marine reconnaissance battalion and commanding an antiterrorism unit in Alaska in the 1990s, just as the Navy was pulling out. “On my visits to Adak, the first feeling was a gut punch. There were so many strategic advantages to having it. I
know there were a lot of decisions made in the base realignment process, but whoever made that decision….”

Adak’s position is certainly strategic: midway between the American and Russian mainlands, athwart both the “great circle”—the shortest route between West Coast and East Asian ports—and the new intercontinental shipping route created by melting Arctic ice. Its deep, sheltered Sweeper Cove can hold multiple aircraft carriers. Add to that a massive array of fuel storage tanks, spacious aircraft hangars, and, in an archipelago long on volcanoes and short on flat land, two 7,000-foot runways, sufficient for the largest jets.

“Adak is critically located to be a chokepoint on the Arctic,” Sullivan argued. “It is both the gateway to the Arctic and a critical outpost in PACOM [Pacific Command] strategy. In the Aleutians, you’re actually much closer to key areas in East Asia than at some points west of the international dateline.” And closer to Arctic waters than Anchorage and Dutch Harbor, the nearest ports equipped for large ships. Relying on them “is like having Miami cover Boston.”

Japanese commanders understood that geopolitical advantage. Historians now think they invaded the Aleutians not to sweep down the coast to Seattle but to prevent more air attacks like the Doolittle raid on their home islands. Other powers get it today, Sullivan explained: “Other entities from other countries have reached out to the Aleut Corporation about building infrastructure there. But the Aleuts are very patriotic, and they did the right thing.”

Sullivan declined to say which entities or countries, and Aleut Corporation executives refuse to confirm or discuss any approaches. But the obvious suspect is China, which in 2018 bid to bankroll and build three international airports on another strategic island, Greenland—until U.S. pressure blocked the deal.

Interest has also come from less threatening quarters: Then-city manager Lockett said he was told “around 2019” that Japan Airlines was interested in extending one of Adak’s runways to accommodate supersonic jets, which aren’t allowed elsewhere in the United States. Passengers would speed there from Asia and Australia, then take conventional jets to the mainland.

America’s top brass have been slower to appreciate this geography, charged Sullivan: “The Pentagon was really the last entity in Washington to recognize the strategic importance of the Arctic.” But even before Chinese warships appeared in Aleutian waters, the stars and bars seemed to be aligning for a re-armed Adak. In 2018 Sullivan brought Defense Secretary Spencer out to visit Adak and Nome, 1,000 miles to the northeast.

Spencer then briefed the Senate Armed Services Committee on possibly deploying
advanced P-8 fighters, sub-chasing successors to the Cold War P3s, on Adak.
In September 2019, 115 Navy and Marine ordnance specialists conducted their first-ever “Arctic expeditionary capabilities” exercises on Adak, while divers dismantled and removed a wrecked fishing boat blocking the Sweeper Cove boat ramp and surveyed two sunken tugs for future removal.

“Adak now has a clear access to the Bering Sea and could be potentially used as a forward staging base due to its deep-water port and close proximity to our near-peer competitors,” the team’s commander told reporters. No such high-profile exercises or visits have taken place since. But “the Biden administration is starting to get it,” said Sullivan, encouraged by its vigorous Arctic and National Security Policies. He and Alaska’s other senator, Lisa Murkowski, inserted language in the 2022 Defense Authorization Act directing a thorough analysis of reactivating Adak.

Sullivan also urged the Marines to locate a “mobile, highly lethal” multimodal expeditionary force on the island: “Having too many Marine forces on Okinawa and now on Guam, where they can’t train very well, makes no sense.” Are the Marines taking that lead? Adak lodging operator Steven Carroll, who hosts many military visitors and other officials, told me “a marine major was here in June [2022], looking for a spot for 700 marines.
He said he found it—‘Now I have to go report to the president.’” Carroll said he also saw a new heavy-duty fuel line installed at the harbor, labeled “JA fuel”—“That’s jet aviation!”—evidently in preparation for expanded air operations.

The armed services have disavowed any settled plans for new facilities. “While continued training in Alaska is vital to the Marine Corps as it moves forward with force modernization efforts, there is no effort to establish or reopen an installation on Adak Island to support our training objectives,” the Corps declared in late 2022. The Marines do however conduct environmental assessments before undertaking training exercises. Might Carroll’s Marine major have been laying the groundwork for further exercises?

As for the Navy, it’s “gathering information to assess the cost associated with potentially conducting a more specific series of operations from Adak,” the service’s Northwest regional headquarters stated in response to my inquiries. But “no formal decisions have been made yet regarding an increased presence of Navy forces or rebuilding of infrastructure in Alaska.”

Skoey Vergen said officials at the Navy’s current P-8 base on Whidbey Island, Washington, were less encouraging. “They told us unofficially they were interested in Cold Bay”—a town at the base of the Aleutian Chain that also has an airstrip—instead. “Its infrastructure isn’t as aged as Adak’s, and the weather is a little friendlier.” The Whidbey Naval Air Station did not respond to calls and email requesting comment.

The Navy is meanwhile returning to the opposite corner of the Bering Sea. In December 2020 Congress authorized construction of a half-billion-dollar deep-draft port at Nome, near the Bering Strait chokepoint. In the short term, a rival has outpaced Adak; Nome’s leaders pushed the project for a decade and lined up sponsors to cover a share of the cost. In the longer term, this could be the first in a series of strategic bases connecting the Pacific and Arctic, with Adak the logical next step.

“The military is coming back,” insisted Carroll. “They’re just being hush-hush about it.”
Lockett, who in 11 years as Adak city manager saw many prospects glimmer and fade, was more skeptical. “It’s a nice pipe dream,” he sighed. “But we’re a small fish in a very big ocean.”