In the Arctic, history has always been written by logistics: who can move, see, and endure when distance stretches supply lines and weather erases the horizon. Today, unmanned systems promise persistent presence across the High North, yet the same theatre that rewards reach also punishes dependence. When a drone is asked to fly through blowing snow, land in gusts, and report through intermittent links, its true capabilities are revealed not in demonstrations but in the slow arithmetic of failure, repair, and recovery.
Drones in Whiteout argues that Arctic autonomy is primarily an engineering and sustainment challenge, not only a tactical one. It shows how cold-weather reliability is designed (or not) into materials, enclosures, and software behaviours; how sensor degradation turns perception into a probabilistic wager rather than a clear picture; how whiteout navigation exposes the brittleness of assumptions about maps, references, and GNSS integrity; and how communications loss forces hard choices about authority, transparency, and safe fallback modes. Across platform design, power management, testing, maintenance cycles, and operator rules, Jonas Merakai maps the tension between the promise of unmanned independence and the reality that autonomy still rests on fragile physical and organisational foundations.
Written for students, general readers, and analysts who want a framework rather than a catalogue of gadgets, the book provides a disciplined way to evaluate autonomous systems by their control limits, recoverability, and operational sustainment. Readers will come away understanding why “can it fly” is the wrong question in the Arctic, and why the decisive measure is whether a system can keep being useful when the environment, and an intelligent adversary, attack the same few dependencies again and again.