The Pentagon and State Department are actively negotiating with Denmark to establish a permanent American military presence at three additional bases across Greenland, General Gregory Guillot told Congress in mid-March.

The push would bring special operations forces and Navy assets to the island for the first time on a permanent basis, a significant expansion beyond the single outpost the US currently operates in northern Greenland.

Only one facility, Pituffik Space Base in northern Greenland, is currently active, staffed by a few hundred troops. The three new locations would give American forces a far broader reach across the island. Two of the sites, Narsarsuaq in southern Greenland and Kangerlussuaq in the southwest, are former American bases used during World War II and the Cold War, long abandoned and returned to local authorities. A third location has not been publicly disclosed.

The negotiations are moving ahead. A White House official told the Daily Mail the administration is "very optimistic that we're on a good trajectory."

What Guillot Told the Senate

General Guillot, who heads US Northern Command, laid out the strategic gap plainly at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. The current footprint in Greenland gives the US fighter, tanker, and space capabilities at Pituffik, but nothing else permanent on the island.

"What we have now is access to a particular air base [Pituffik] in the northern part of Greenland which gives us some of the fighter and tanker capability and a lot of space capability, but we don't have a permanent presence for [special operations forces] and then we don't have a permanent presence for some of the maritime capabilities that I need."

That's the commander responsible for defending the American homeland telling lawmakers he doesn't have what he needs in one of the most strategically valuable territories on the planet. The Arctic is not a future concern. Moscow and Beijing's vessels regularly transit off the coast of Greenland. The gap between what the US has there and what it needs is not theoretical.

Guillot told lawmakers he is working across the Defense Department and other agencies to develop more ports and airfields, which would provide "more options for our secretary and for the president, should we need them up in the Arctic."

The 1951 Treaty Does the Heavy Lifting

What makes this expansion legally and diplomatically viable is a 1951 Danish-American defense agreement that remains central to the current negotiations. The treaty grants sweeping access to the US military in Greenland, and Guillot made clear that the existing framework is more than sufficient for what the Pentagon wants to do.

"We don't really need a new treaty. It's very comprehensive, and it's frankly very favorable to our operations or potential operations in Greenland."

This matters enormously. The legal architecture already exists. The US doesn't need to renegotiate terms or go hat in hand to Copenhagen for a new agreement. It needs to activate what it already has. The 1951 treaty was written in a world that understood the Arctic's strategic importance. Seventy-plus years later, the geopolitical logic has only sharpened.

The fact that this agreement has been sitting there, largely unused beyond Pituffik, while great power competition in the Arctic intensified, is itself an indictment of prior administrations that treated Greenland as a frozen afterthought.

Why Greenland, Why Now

President Trump has repeatedly insisted that US control of Greenland is a national security imperative. His framing has been characteristically direct. "Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China."

That's not bluster. It's a description of reality. Denmark fields a capable military for a nation of its size, but the scale of the challenge in the Arctic exceeds what any small European country can project across the world's largest island. Greenland sits between North America and Europe, commanding Arctic sea lanes that are growing more navigable and more contested every year. Whoever controls access to those waters and the airspace above them holds a decisive advantage in any northern hemisphere contingency.

The bases being discussed aren't random pins on a map. They represent geographic coverage across Greenland's full span:

• Pituffik Space Base in the north (already active)
• Narsarsuaq in the south
• Kangerlussuaq in the southwest
• A fourth, undisclosed location

That distribution would give US forces the ability to operate across the island rather than from a single point in its far north. Special operations forces and naval capabilities stationed permanently at these locations would transform Greenland from a surveillance outpost into a genuine forward operating territory.

The Real Question

For decades, the Arctic sat at the margins of American defense planning. It was too remote, too frozen, too irrelevant to the theaters where the US was actually fighting. That era is over. The competition is moving north, and the US has a treaty, the relationships, and now the political will to move with it.

The old bases at Narsarsuaq and Kangerlussuaq were built by Americans, used by Americans, and abandoned when the threat seemed to recede. The threat didn't recede. It just waited.

Now the troops are going back.