Hannah Hirsh, a former stripper of five years who left the sex industry after an encounter with Jesus, is at peace now, even as she discusses the "dark" life she escaped to help save other women from a similar fate.

"A lot of the things that I saw while I was in that life for five years was very dark. You see a lot of addiction. I even got involved into addiction myself. You see drugs. You see alcohol… you even see trafficking," Hirsh told Fox News Digital.

"[To the] women just wanting to go to the club and thinking, ‘I can just go and make some quick money,’ you don't realize the door that you're opening, and you don't realize all of the darkness that comes with it… This all comes with that lifestyle and just feeling empty inside, feeling dead inside and just going against your morals just for money," she continued.

'DOUBLE LIVES' STAR SAYS BEING KICKED OUT OF CHURCH OVER ADULT CONTENT CAREER DIDN'T SHAKE HER FAITH

"I fell into the temptation [of stripping] because of the allure of money… [That’s what] stripping glamorizes [and] society glamorizes this lifestyle and portrays it to be something it's not," Hirsh added.

"If you've actually lived inside of it, you know that while you are doing this, you are not happy," she relayed.

Hirsh’s career in the sex industry came to a halt when the clubs in her area shut down during the pandemic of 2020. The abrupt halt prompted her to sit in silence with God, a reality she describes as pulling her heart out of that line of work and closer to Him.

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"Society makes it seem like this luxurious lifestyle is the goal, but what I have truly learned is the goal is Jesus. The goal is eternal life. That is the true goal. And true riches are found in God," Hirsh continued.

"This fast-paced lifestyle [is] glamorized by society, but it is not glamorous at all. This is coming from someone who lived it," she added.

Hirsh went on to share that "most of the women" in the stripping are "on drugs" and "drinking every single day to numb" themselves to their work.

DEPROGRAMMED: THE 'RADICAL PERSPECTIVE CHANGE' THAT LED THIS TRANSGENDER ATHEIST TO JESUS

"You're constantly being degraded on a daily basis. So, it's not empowering you at all — it's actually belittling you and making you feel less than. But because you are walking away with money, you think that it's empowering you, but just as fast as that money comes is just as fast it goes," she revealed.

"What goes through my mind when I go into the strip club is that these women need God… I go in there and I tell them what they need to hear, what God is placing in my spirit to tell them because my job is to just plant the seed, but God is the one that's going to make the seed grow," she continued.

Hirsh founded "Kept by Grace Ministry" shortly after reconnecting with her faith, and visits strip clubs regularly to pull women out of the sex industry.

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"For the Christians that believe strippers are beyond saving, I would say that they don't have a true relationship with the Lord… Jesus sat and ate with prostitutes. Jesus was going to those that the Pharisees were calling too dirty… So for the Christians that believe that strippers are too far gone, I would say that you need to understand the heart of God because no stripper, nobody is too far gone for God. No matter what they have done, God can redeem anybody," Hirsh said.

The people who oversee the largest budget in the world, who are in charge of an entity ultimately responsible for the largest number of employees in the U.S., and who are put in charge specifically to represent constituents somehow have no broad fiduciary duty — Congress.

In most large businesses, and certainly every publicly traded one, a board of directors is put in place to represent that business’s stakeholders. This is referred to as a fiduciary duty, which in layman’s terms, is a legal obligation to act in the best interests of those you represent. It also comes with consequences, because as a fiduciary, you can be sued for putting your interests ahead of those you represent or for negligence or bad judgment.

Fiduciary relationships come into place not only in companies, but for certain financial advisory relationships and trustees as well. The fiduciary relationship is a legal one, which means those in charge must legally act honestly and with care, avoid conflicts of interest and be trustworthy to the parties they represent.

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Somehow, Congress has managed to avoid this. Sure, they take a "moral" oath and have some fairly weak, in my opinion, disclosure and ethics rules. But the people who are in charge of making laws and passing budgets (if you can call regular and overwhelming overspending a "budget") have no true legal, fiduciary role.

We have seen and paid the price for this. The national debt exceeds $40 trillion. Congress spends around $7 trillion a year, $2 trillion more than it takes in. They have been at the center of driving massive inflation for the American people. We, as a country, are now paying more for the interest on our debt than we are for the defense of our country, the latter being one legitimate thing government should be doing.

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We have seen Congress write and pass laws that tip the scales in favor of certain groups at the expense of others. We have seen them enrich themselves through stock trading (despite the STOCK Act of 2012).

We have seen calls for term limits, an issue which the majority of Americans favor, be ignored, sometimes even leaving members of Congress with clearly diminished capacity in their roles.

As I have written about previously, I am often asked if the national debt crisis is solvable. And the answer comes always in two parts: we do have the tools to do so, but we do not have the political structure to do so.

If Congress has no obligation to do what is in our best interest instead of theirs, if we cannot hold them accountable for misdeeds, and if our only real recourse is threatening to vote them out of office, nothing is going to change.

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It is truly not right that those who act in the capacity of others on serious legal and financial matters in the private sector have a fiduciary obligation to those they represent, yet the behemoth that our government has become bears no such obligation, including from those who represent the American people.

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When individuals bear no requirement to act in the best interests of those they represent, and they are given access to great power and other people’s money, of course, we are going to end up with massive debt and a dysfunctional country.

We should require care, trust and duty from our representatives. And it should be a legal obligation, not a theoretical one.

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FIRST ON FOX — A former senior federal prosecutor who served in the Biden administration has been hit with a criminal investigation referral asking the Justice Department to look into whether she misled federal agents about her role in an investigation, Fox News Digital has learned.

Jina Choi joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California in late 2023, shortly after which Biden-appointed U.S. Attorney Ismail Ramsey tapped her to lead its Corporate and Securities Fraud Section, which handles major corporate and securities cases across the Bay Area, including Silicon Valley.

Before joining the office, however, Choi had represented IRL, a social-media startup co-founded by Abraham Shafi. The company was built around organizing and connecting people through events. IRL shut down in 2023 after a board-directed investigation concluded that 95% of its users were likely bots, a finding Shafi disputed. Shafi was later indicted in 2025 on federal fraud and obstruction charges.

The referral represents an unusually aggressive challenge to the conduct of a former prosecutor involved in the broader matter.

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Cully Stimson, acting director of the Heritage Foundation’s Legal Policy Center and himself a former federal prosecutor, told Fox News Digital that, while it is common for defense teams to attack prosecutors, resorting to a criminal investigation referral is rare.

The referral, sent on Tuesday by a lawyer Shafi retained separately from his defense, turns on whether Choi remained involved in the IRL investigation after joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office despite being screened from the matter because of her prior representation of the company. The Justice Department generally has no obligation to respond to referrals like this.

Prosecutors said Choi was walled off from the federal investigation involving IRL and Shafi. But Shafi’s lawyer now alleges that internal communications and an FBI interview report show she remained involved in the matter and later understated that involvement to federal agents.

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The FBI declined to comment when reached by Fox News Digital.

In the criminal referral sent to the Justice Department on Tuesday, Shafi’s lawyer asked federal authorities to investigate whether Choi made false statements about her role in the investigation into IRL.

The federal investigation into IRL predated Choi’s arrival at the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Prosecutors have said she was screened from the matter because of her prior representation of the company.

Shafi’s defense claims to have obtained internal emails sent by Choi as well as FBI interview memoranda recounting a conversation she had with federal agents from the prosecution. Shafi’s lawyer argues the documents contradict Choi’s account to agents.

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While Choi’s communications are quoted or described in public court filings, the government filed the underlying email exhibits under seal or as sealed exhibit slipsheets. As a result, the public cannot independently inspect the original documents or assess their full context.

Choi worked for IRL as outside counsel before joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office, according to court filings. During this time, Shafi’s defense alleged in its motion to dismiss the case against him that Choi attempted to get federal authorities to target Shafi to shield other stakeholders at the firm. The government denied this characterization, acknowledging that she advocated that the firm itself not be targeted, but disputing that she wanted the government to go after Shafi.

The tech founder’s defense argues that Choi’s prior representation of IRL created a conflict of interest. Prosecutors have said she was walled off from the investigation because of that prior relationship. As of publishing, no ruling has been made finding that Choi operated under a conflict of interest that warrants dismissal.

Shafi’s lawyer argues that documents they obtained tell a different story.

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The FBI, which was investigating the Shafi case, interviewed Choi in July and questioned her about her role in the IRL investigation, according to the referral. Choi allegedly told agents that she did "not have any kind of role in the investigation."

An internal message purportedly obtained by the defense, however, quotes her as saying, "I talked to [her predecessor]] and I wanted to see if it would be ok to add [him] to the IRL team to help move it along."

In other instances, documents obtained by the defense allegedly show that she inquired about the name of the FBI agent working on the IRL case and that she sent press coverage of the case against Shafi to other prosecutors.

At one point during her FBI interview, Shafi's lawyer claims Choi said that she was not aware "who was assigned to the case team."

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According to the criminal investigation referral, Choi "admitted keeping a written case tracker on which ‘the SHAFI investigation was listed.’" The defense claims that the U.S. Attorney’s Office refused to turn over the case tracker by describing it as a "privileged and internal work product."

Shafi was charged with wire fraud, securities fraud and obstruction a few months after Choi left the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The charges stem from allegations that he misled investors by misrepresenting user growth on his platform. Prosecutors allege that he used paid advertising to attract people to IRL, then passed off the resulting growth as organic while raising about $170 million from investors.

He also stands accused of misusing investors’ funds for clothing, home furnishings, travel, hotels and wedding-related costs. The founder’s lawyer argues that Choi’s alleged false statements to federal agents, coupled with her prior representation of IRL, taint the charges against Shafi.

JACK SMITH DOUBLES DOWN AGAINST GOP ACCUSATIONS HE LIED UNDER OATH

Shafi’s defense has a strong incentive to prove that Choi acted improperly, as doing so could seriously derail the prosecution of their client.

"Here, the defense's allegations are troubling if true, because if their allegations end up being true, there was spillage," Stimson told Fox News Digital. "And that would mean some other members of that office are therefore conflicted, and it could result in the entire office being conflicted if a judge found that the taint was so bad that it permeated the whole office."

Stimson also said that, in his experience, individual U.S. Attorneys’ Offices generally operate with significant independence on casework, cautioning against attributing Choi’s alleged conduct to the Biden administration more broadly.

As of publishing, Choi has not been charged with any crime or disciplined for any professional misconduct in connection with the Shafi prosecution.

Choi did not respond to a request for comment when reached by Fox News Digital.

In the summer of 2012 — when knuckleballer R. A. Dickey came out of nowhere to win the Cy Young award — I discovered my sons in our backyard teaching themselves the pitch. The knuck, a slow trick pitch that doesn’t spin, has a storied history of elevating longshots, retreads and dreamers to the major leagues — even the Hall of Fame.

I resolved to see how far my kids could go. On the decade-long odyssey that followed, I learned that not only baseball-crazy boys harbored knuckleball dreams. Two wealthy business moguls did too. Their intersecting lives are one of the strange but true stories in my new book, "School of Hard Knucks: My Three Sons and Baseball’s Wildest Pitch."

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Brooklyn real estate investor Howard Rich, a free-market guy who founded Americans for Limited Government, had Mets season tickets six rows behind home plate — the ideal place to watch Dickey’s knuckleball baffle hitters in 2012.

"If the knuckleball’s so hard to hit," Rich ’ s wife Andrea asked one game, "why does only one pitcher throw it in the major leagues?"

Great question, Rich thought. This was a market failure. He’d fix it by opening a school — the International Knuckleball Academy (IKA). He hired two minor league knucklers, Chris Nowlin and Zach Staniewicz to run it.

On the other side of the globe, a 36-year-old South Korean who made a fortune in video games had never given up on his boyhood dream of playing pro baseball.

"I thought if I could master the knuckleball," Min Hur told me, "I might still have a chance."

Hur converted the roof of his Seoul office building into a personal training facility, with a retractable dome and cutting-edge pitch tracking technology. He’d also reached out to the greatest knuckleballer of all, Phil Niekro.

"Phil invited me to his home in Atlanta and over a month taught me everything from the grip to the philosophy behind the pitch. He became my great mentor."

Hur worked with another knuckleball legend, Charlie Hough, too.

"He could take the spin off the ball pretty darn well," Hough recalled.

In 2013, Hur hired a well-connected agent who got him tryouts with the Rangers, Mariners, and Diamondbacks. They all passed on Hur. Then the Rockland Boulders, an independent minor league team in upstate New York, agreed to give him a look.

Min’s chauffeur drove him and his translator up from Manhattan every day of tryouts. He made the team and stepped away from his businesses to focus on his knuckleball career.

The Boulders promoted Hur’s pro debut as" Min-Sanity," playing off the NBA’s "Lin-Sanity" craze when point guard Jeremy Lin caught fire with the Knicks.

Min bussed up spectators from New York’s Korean neighborhoods and flew his family in from Seoul. They watched him pitch three innings and surrender five runs on five hits and four walks. He also hit three batters.

Howard Rich read all about it, and wondered if Hur would want to partner with the IKA. He called Nowlin.

" There’s a Korean billionaire in New York right now, and he loves knuckleballs," said Rich. "Set up a meting for us."

Rich, Hur, Nowlin, and Staniewicz had dinner in Koreatown, but much was lost in translation. Hur remembers talking about knuckleballs, but nothing about an academy.

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Rich forged ahead with the IKA, renting Dodgertown, the one-time spring training complex of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Staniewicz worried.

"It’s hard enough to find people who want to throw the knuckleball, much less pay thousands of dollars a week to try to learn it," he told me. "That cut the pool of possible clients from, like, ten to two."

Rich offered a financing plan. He told me about it last year when he took me to a Mets game.

"I hired a hot-shot attorney to draft a contract so players could come for free, but if any went on to throw, say, ten pitches in the majors, we'd get a small percentage of their pay."

Even still, the International Knuckleball Academy shut its doors before a single aspiring knuckler walked through them.

Min Hur is still at it. I recently met him at a batting cage in Lower Manhattan. He’d flown in from Australia after a stint with the Melbourne Aces and was rendezvousing with a knuckleball coach from Buffalo named Joe Gannon.

Hur’s now 50 years old. That’s ancient for most baseball players, but not too old for a knuckleballer. So the dream lives on.

"I’m better than ever," he told me.

A professor recently discovered that a medieval castle thought to have been lost for centuries was hiding in plain sight — inside a Victorian-era building on a modern college campus.

The discovery was announced by University College Dublin (UCD), in Dublin, Ireland, on Sept. 18.

The school announced in a release — entitled "'Lost' medieval castle found hiding inside UCD building" — that medieval archaeology professor Tadhg O'Keeffe found substantial portions of the medieval Roebuck Castle still survive within the university's present-day building.

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The present-day Roebuck Castle retained the name of its medieval predecessor — but the Victorian-looking building was long believed to contain little, if any, of the original castle.

The original structure had fallen into ruin by the 18th century and was later incorporated into a residence that underwent extensive alterations, including a major Victorian makeover in 1874. UCD purchased the property in 1986.

O'Keeffe told Fox News Digital that, despite those centuries of changes, most of the medieval structure is still there.

"I would say that 70 to 80% of the building is still there, hidden under Victorian plaster," he said.

He began investigating after studying 18th-century watercolors by artist Gabriel Beranger, which depicted the medieval castle before the property underwent major redevelopment.

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"I wasn't terribly optimistic," O'Keeffe said. "When I got into the building and had a look around, I realized that actually, most of the castle is still there, inside the building.

"It's not obvious to the naked eye," he went on. "It's not obvious to a non-expert. But I specialize in medieval castle architecture, and I saw all the indications when I went in that the castle is still there."

The clues were hiding beneath the building's more modern appearance.

O'Keeffe pointed to unusually thick walls, along with a stone vault and arched stone roof, as evidence of the building's medieval past.

"The gate tower is very clear on the inside," he said.

FIRST-EVER IMAGES REVEAL MYSTERIOUS REMAINS OF TOWN SWALLOWED BY SEA 700 YEARS AGO

"Everything is plastered over so you can't see the original stonework anymore, but it's all clearly still there," he said. "Also, the windows are splayed, and splayed windows are a real indication of a medieval date."

Roebuck Castle was likely built in the early 13th century, after the Norman invasion of Ireland began in the late 12th century.

Roebuck Castle also stands out for another reason: Researchers know who owned it through much of the Middle Ages.

The owners were "people of some significance," O'Keeffe added.

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"One of them, in modern terms, would be the equivalent of the chief justice in the Supreme Court, the most senior legal person in Ireland for part of the Middle Ages," the historian said.

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"Another resident at one stage, temporarily, was King James II. It's reputed that he lived there briefly in the late 1600s."

That level of detail is unusual, O'Keeffe said, because records for castles around Dublin are generally sparse.

"We have a record of its owners really until about the start of the 17th century, when it seems to have been abandoned and probably suffered in the wars of the mid-17th century," he said. "So it's unusual for a castle of its type to have a recorded history."

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Although the renovations preserved much of the medieval castle, O'Keeffe said, it appears to have been more a matter of practicality than historic preservation.

"There was no policy of preservation. There was not a particular interest in the medieval building," he said.

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"They clearly figured that the fastest way to do that was to simply leave those walls and incorporate them."

O'Keeffe said the discovery suggests other castles in Ireland that are presumed lost could still survive within later buildings.

"The great takeaway ... is never assume things are gone," he said. "You have to go in and look. You have to explore."

"There are probably lots of other castles that are locked up in buildings around the country [and] are assumed to be gone — but are not gone at all," he said. 

Despite the recent surge in AI doomerism, President Donald Trump is right to maintain his strong support for data centers. As he notes: "China couldn’t be happier" if we were to turn our backs on these centers as a nation, which would effectively let the Chinese Communist Party win the AI race.

As Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in July, "The country that leads in artificial intelligence in the coming years and decades ahead will be the global superpower." Victory means capturing trillions of dollars in national wealth, securing an advantage in military technology, and gaining enormous leverage in international affairs.

An energy bottleneck could pose a serious risk to America’s AI lead. We need data centers to train and run top-tier AI models, and those centers need a lot of electricity. In 2024, they accounted for over 4% of electricity use, and their consumption is expected to more than double by 2030.

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Ensuring there is sufficient supply and generation to meet the soaring demand is imperative to staying in the lead.

Solar should be a key part of that equation. New data centers need energy right now. New gas turbines and other large power projects can take years to bring online. Solar and battery projects can generally be deployed much faster, making them especially useful for meeting the near-term surge in electricity demand.

Solar power has been closely associated with the environmental left, because for decades, Democrats largely sold solar as a climate policy, often with no concern for cost, for whether the panels themselves were made in America, or whether deployment strengthened a supply chain dominated by China.

However, the strategic equation has changed. Under the Trump Administration, the case for solar isn’t about "going green." It’s about reindustrialization, energy security, technological leadership, and the national interest.

The Trump Administration recognizes the value that producing more domestic batteries brings to our energy security. That’s why the Energy Department recently backed 220 megawatts of new battery storage in Puerto Rico, which is enough to provide backup electricity for more than 100,000 customers during power shortages. This project will use American-made battery technology — strengthening the grid and our domestic energy supply chain at the same time.

Thanks in large part to the work of the Trump Administration, a very different picture of solar has emerged from the one encountered a decade ago. By creating the conditions for investment in Made-in-America panels and components, Washington is turning what was once a China-dependent industry into another source of American energy security and industrial strength. In fact, private industry has poured $18.2 billion into building a domestic solar supply chain since 2022, and cell production was recently reshored for the first time in five years.

Battery storage in the U.S. just topped 52 gigawatts of capacity, and it's been growing about 70% a year for three years straight. Thanks to these batteries, the American people now have significant access to this power not just when the sun is out at midday, but also in the evenings when America’s workers return home and turns on their lights and air conditioning.

President Trump’s agenda has created an opportunity to support the domestic U.S. solar industry that we should take advantage of. By emphasizing solar as part of a broader all of the above energy dominance strategy, we can reinvigorate the domestic supply chains and spur U.S. production necessary to supporting our national interests, in both energy and AI policy.

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Building up secure domestic supply chains for solar has the added advantage of insulating the U.S. against future energy shocks because the fuel these panels run on doesn’t require pipelines or tankers. Iran might be able to mine the Strait of Hormuz, but it can’t block out the sun.

Call it an Arsenal of Democracy for the AI age. At a moment when the country needs vastly more electricity, American companies are answering with real capital and real factories, and Washington is finally clearing a path for them to build here at home.

The AI race will decide who leads the global economy for a generation. As one of the fastest sources of new power backed by an increasingly domestic supply chain, solar is a vital asset. America must bring solar online to continue driving AI development and U.S. technological leadership.

I spent four years as an Army infantry officer in Alaska, where our operational responsibilities stretched from Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Ocean to the Aleutian Islands reaching toward Russia.

During Exercise Brim Frost ’89, some 26,000 American and Canadian troops took the field, and I served as a brigade operations officer. As we maneuvered across Alaska’s interior, temperatures plunged as low as 76 degrees below zero. The exercise produced more than 250 cold-weather injuries, including 88 cases of frostbite. At those temperatures, fuel systems become unreliable, batteries lose power, lubricants thicken and weapons and vehicles can fail in ways soldiers from warmer climates rarely encounter.

And no, a week on the slopes at Vail does not prepare anyone for that. The Arctic punishes amateurs.

TRUMP’S GREENLAND DEAL SET FOR SIGNING AFTER MONTHS-LONG FIGHT OVER US CONTROL

That experience is why President Donald Trump’s Greenland announcement at the United Nations on Tuesday deserves attention beyond the political headlines. "We’ll be building two very major military bases," the president told the General Assembly.

The agreement Trump signed with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenland Premier Jens-Frederik Nielsen amends the 1951 defense pact. It allows the United States to modernize and expand the existing Pituffik Space Base in the northwest and to establish new defense areas at Narsarsuaq in the south and Mestersvig in the northeast. It also grants U.S. forces broad access by land, air and sea, including undersea access for American public vessels within Greenland’s territorial waters.

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Announcing an Arctic base, however, is a long way from making one operational. Frederiksen said no decision has been made on the specifics of Golden Dome, and Washington has yet to say which forces will occupy the new sites or when.

Forget the flat map and look at the globe from over the North Pole. Alaska, northern Canada and Greenland form the northern approaches to North America, and Greenland sits astride the routes connecting the Arctic Ocean, the North Atlantic and Europe.

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The Pentagon’s 2024 Arctic Strategy calls the North American Arctic vital to homeland defense because it hosts NORAD’s aerospace and maritime warning.

Greenland has been strategic terrain for generations. Narsarsuaq itself was an American air base, Bluie West One, until the United States closed it in 1958. At the height of the Cold War, Washington operated 17 military facilities with more than 10,000 troops on the island. Today only Pituffik remains, with about 150 service members.

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Pituffik supports missile warning, missile defense and space surveillance. The new agreement recognizes American access to defend Greenland, the NATO area and the American continent, including through Golden Dome, Trump’s planned missile-defense system.

Add Narsarsuaq and Mestersvig, and the United States could build a distributed Arctic network. Pituffik is already the northern sensor and space node. Narsarsuaq could strengthen access to Greenland’s southern approaches and the North Atlantic, while Mestersvig could extend American and allied reach toward the Greenland Sea.

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That geography matters most against Russia.

Russia fields the most developed military presence in the Arctic. Its Kola Peninsula hosts the Northern Fleet and important strategic nuclear forces. The Pentagon warns that Russian Arctic capabilities could place the American homeland and allied territory at risk and complicate U.S. power projection.

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Russia does not have to invade Greenland for Greenland to matter. Russian submarines, long-range aircraft and missiles make the island important because of where it sits. More American sites could improve warning, surveillance, reinforcement and resilience while reducing our dependence on a single installation.

China presents a different problem. Beijing is not an Arctic nation, yet it has spent years seeking influence there. The Pentagon strategy documents Chinese icebreaker operations, dual-use research and growing military cooperation with Russia.

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Against China, the agreement’s most consequential provision may involve no runway at all. No non-NATO country may establish a manned or unmanned military installation or maintain a persistent military presence in Greenland without the parties’ agreement. The pact also bars non-allied control of, or significant influence over, critical infrastructure, resource extraction and other sensitive sectors. It has no expiration date, and it requires Denmark and Greenland to ensure that any future independent Greenland remains in NATO and assumes the pact’s defense obligations.

"No U.S. adversary will ever be permitted to establish a military presence in Greenland," Trump said. That closes one path to a Chinese foothold in the Arctic.

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None of this changes the lesson I learned at 76 below zero. An Arctic base is a supply chain that has to survive January. And an Arctic force is more than troops flown north on short notice. The people operating those bases must know how to live, maintain equipment and perform their missions where routine mistakes quickly turn deadly.

Fuel must arrive. Aircraft must fly. Vehicles must start. Communications must work. Soldiers must function outdoors without becoming cold-weather casualties. Spare parts must travel thousands of miles from America’s industrial base.

The Army’s Arctic strategy says the service must "man, train, equip, and organize to win in the Arctic." The Pentagon calls for better communications above 65 degrees north, where satellite coverage thins. Pituffik and Mestersvig both sit well north of that line.

Can two additional U.S. defense areas strengthen deterrence against Russia and China? They can, but concrete and runways alone deter no one.

Deterrence exists when an adversary believes America and its allies can see what is coming, move forces, sustain them and respond effectively. Greenland strengthens each of those against Russia. Against China, denying military access and strategic investment may matter just as much.

The agreement provides geography and access. The hard work is converting them into enduring capability.

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Alaska taught me long ago that the Arctic has little patience for PowerPoint plans or optimistic assumptions. At 76 below zero, strategy meets reality fast.

The adversaries have changed since World War II and the Cold War. The geography has not. Neither has the Arctic’s unforgiving nature.

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