Sleasy, coddled New Yorker runs headlong into the People of the Northlands and falls on his ass

If Donald Trump is to be believed, the four- and two-legged warriors of the Sirius Dog Sled Patrol sum up why Greenland needs America to protect it properly.

Armed with old-school Enfield bolt-action rifles, and powered by huskies rather than motors, the dozen-man Danish unit is the world’s only canine-driven special forces team, patrolling the ice-bound coast of northern Greenland year-round.

When the US president began ramping up demands for ownership of the island earlier this month, Denmark announced it would beef up the patrols, which have operated since the Second World War. In Trump’s view, they will be about as effective as deploying the stars of the canine cartoon caper Paw Patrol.

“They put an extra dog sled there last month,” he told reporters last week. “That’s not going to do the trick.”

As ever, the US leader was not quite accurate. The two extra dog teams are part of a £4.8bn package of additional Danish military spending pledged in the wake of his sabre-rattling, including five new patrol ships and four long-range drones.

Yet despite Trump’s withering comments, the dog sled teams can be far more effective than military hardware when it comes to defending Greenland. This, after all, is a place of 100mph blizzards and constant winter darkness, making it impossible for satellites to see, aircraft to fly and vehicles to roam. However, it is possible – just – for dogs and humans to operate, as the Sirius Patrol’s remarkable mission has proved over the decades.

Made up of six two-man teams – each with up to 15 Greenland dogs, a type of husky – the patrols spend up to five months at a time roaming Greenland’s north, where winter temperatures can drop to minus 55C.

They work in conditions little different from those endured by the polar explorers Scott and Amundsen, relying solely on their animals as a mode of transport and living in tents and makeshift snow shelters. Even their guns have changed little: their main weapon is a bolt-action M1917 Enfield, a descendant of the British rifles used in the First World War. While it lacks the rapid-fire capabilities of an American M4 assault rifle or a Russian Kalashnikov, it is the only weapon deemed reliable in extreme Arctic weather.

Covering around 20 miles per day, the sled teams travel for up to 700 miles on each patrol, most of it through territory so remote there is no chance of rescue if injured. Yet while the tiny force covers an area with 9,000 miles of coastline, it has still proved militarily useful, skirmishing with Nazi landing parties during the Second World War and helping deny them a foothold on Greenland’s coast.

To this day, they are considered the most elite of all Denmark’s special forces – an Arctic equivalent to the Long Range Desert Group that was the basis of Britain’s SAS. And while Trump now seems to have backed off his threats to prise Greenland from Denmark by force, military figures say he was always wrong to disparage the art of warfare by dog-sled.