I Knew the Strategy, Not the Arctic

By M.P. Woodward

One of the joys of writing military and intelligence fiction is that I get to relive the years I spent living adjacent to the world I now construct on the page.

As a former naval intelligence officer, I was privileged to have a front-row seat to a wide spectrum of military operations, national security planning, intelligence analysis, and the complicated, friction-filled reality of geopolitics. Later in life, when I began writing full-time, I naturally drew on those experiences to build my fictional universes.

Writing as an author in the “Clancyverse,” navigating the legendary worlds of Jack Ryan, John Clark, and Ding Chavez, requires a deep, almost cellular knowledge of Tom Clancy’s characters. But it also demands a flawless understanding of evolving global flashpoints and the national security personnel charged with responding to them.

Usually, I’m able to mine my prior career or pick up the phone to grill an old veteran friend to find the tactical ground truth I need. That was the formula for Shadow State, where I explored China’s predatory relationship with Vietnam in the contested waters of the South China Sea, a region I knew intimately from my time with USINDOPACOM. It was the case for Line of Demarcation, where I examined gray-zone actors in Latin America, a frequent target of my focus at the Office of Naval Intelligence. It was true again for Terminal Velocity, which leaned into the enduring, razor-edge tensions between India and Pakistan that were a worry throughout my entire naval career.

In each of those Clancy thrillers, the seeds of the story emerged from dirt I had personally stood on or targets I had studied professionally. For updated technical research, I had enough acquaintances either still in uniform or recently retired to update me on unclassified advances in military tech and tactics.

But when it came to writing my newest Clancy thriller, The Coldest War, I hit a wall.

My intelligence background was a useful baseline for reverse-engineering the Kremlin’s antagonistic motives, but it fell far short of understanding what it actually feels like to fight, freeze, and survive a great-power conflict in the High North. I lacked the physical scars of the Arctic. And in a Clancy novel, authenticity isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s the brand.

The White Space on the Map

The Coldest War imagines a sudden, shattering geopolitical crisis in the High North, where a revanchist Russia attempts to exploit the Arctic’s melting ice and gain sovereignty over most of the Arctic Ocean, a sea that’s five times the size of the Mediterranean. In the grand Clancy tradition, the narrative hinges on a series of what-ifs:

What if Russia decided to systematically challenge the sovereign rules-based order in the Arctic the way China has weaponized features in the South China Sea? What if geography, critical resources, military infrastructure, and political opportunity aligned for Russia at precisely the wrong moment for the West? What if a crisis developed so rapidly, and with such calculated ambiguity, that political leaders in Washington and Brussels struggled to determine whether they were witnessing aggressive competition, gray-zone coercion, or the opening salvos of World War III?

Those questions are fictional. But the strategic trends driving them are cold, hard reality.

The region contains vital, opening sea lanes, massive untapped energy reserves, and some of the world’s most critical submarine hunting grounds. Recognizing this, Russia has spent a decade aggressively investing in Arctic-hardened bases, deep-water logistics hubs, and the world’s largest fleet of icebreakers. NATO has responded with renewed, if hurried, attention. The High North may be sparsely populated, but it has quietly become one of the most consequential strategic crossroads on earth.

All the geopolitical ingredients were there for a good, Arctic-set Clancy thriller. But as I began plotting the novel, I hit a fundamental problem. I understood the geopolitical theory. I did not understand the place.

You can read unclassified research articles until your eyes bleed. You can study topographical maps, analyze satellite imagery, and deconstruct adversary military doctrine. But eventually, every writer reaches a point where intellectual comprehension stops and firsthand sensory experience must take over.

So, I got out from behind my desk and headed north.

When Weather Becomes a Combatant

Over the course of my research, I traveled well above the Arctic Circle, embedding with Norwegian and Finnish military units. I spoke with fighter pilots, cold-weather commandos, conscripts, intelligence handlers, submariners, and senior commanders. I toured secure facilities, stood on remote borders, and took the wheel of a massive icebreaker. Along the way, I froze my tail off on a long, miserable bivouac in the snow and asked a staggering number of questions.

I came away impressed by the dedication and professionalism of our NATO partners. Yet I also realized that the first adversary in the High North isn’t necessarily a foreign invader. It’s the environment itself.

Emblematic of this notion, a Norwegian commando guided me to a concealed, snow-covered outpost. As we crawled up to the position, a faint, rhythmic hissing sound cut through the silence.

“What do you think that is?” he asked.

I guessed it was a tactical gas stove. I was technically right.

“No,” the commando corrected me quietly. “That’s the sound of life.”

That interaction completely reframed my approach to the book. In most military fiction, weather is mere scenery, atmospherics to set the stage. In Arctic operations, the environment is an untamed combatant that dictates terms to both sides. Batteries drain to zero in an hour. Drones ice up and fall out of the sky. Tracked armor slides effortlessly off ice-slicked mountain passes. The climate imposes a tax on every tactical decision.

Watching those Finnish and Norwegian troops operate drove home a timeless truth that modern military commentators might overlook: warfare remains a human endeavor.

In America, our defense conversations are utterly obsessed with technology. We talk about hypersonic precision weapons, LEO satellites, AI, autonomous swarms. Those innovations matter, certainly. But standing in northern Norway, watching soldiers pack gear in conditions that challenge basic human survival, I realized that tech is a fragile crutch when the mercury drops to 40 below, sapping batteries and killing motors.

Those visceral lessons became the bedrock of The Coldest War. The Arctic in this novel isn’t a backdrop; it’s a living character. It drives the ruthless geopolitics that force our protagonists to find their breaking points, and it fuels the desperation of our antagonists.

Chasing What You Don’t Know

There is a tired piece of advice handed to authors: Write what you know. I only half-agree. Writers should absolutely anchor their authority in what they know. But if you want to write something that leaves a mark, you have to aggressively chase what you don’t know.

The most vital, electric details in The Coldest War didn’t come from think-tank white papers or news feeds. They came from standing in the freezing wind, listening to professionals who live on the edge. A pilot explaining how to land a ski-equipped LC-130 on the ice. A ski trooper reminding me that success or failure out here often comes down to a small stove hissing beneath a camouflage net.

These granular details matter because authenticity is the ultimate respect you can show your reader. The veterans, active service members, and tactical professionals who read The Havok Journal know exactly what real operational life looks like. They know it looks nothing like a glossy Hollywood set. It is far more complicated, far more exhausting, and infinitely more interesting.

And, selfishly, getting out from behind the desk to find that out makes my current day job a hell of a lot more fun.

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M.P. Woodward is a former naval intelligence officer and the author of the upcoming Tom Clancy thriller, The Coldest War. To learn more, visit mpwoodward.com or follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and X: @MP_Woodward, @mp.woodward, and @MPWauthor.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.