The front cover of the administration’s fiscal 2017 budget request shows a picture of Denali, the peak in Alaska that President Obama renamed during his trip there last fall. While on that same trip, he promised to accelerate construction of an icebreaker and invest in the Arctic.
Lawmakers say they are pleased that the president has put his money where his mouth is with a $150 million request to begin designing an icebreaker in fiscal 2017. But a more significant investment is needed to ensure the U.S. can compete with Russia and others with an interest in the Arctic.
“The icebreaker is the highway of the Arctic,” Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, told the Washington Examiner. “Right now the Russians have an interstate and we have an unpaved back road.”
The administration’s fiscal 2017 budget request released this month would give $150 million to the Coast Guard to cover design of an icebreaker and drum up interest among shipbuilders.
The Coast Guard said in a statement that it “affirms the president’s statements regarding his commitment to the Arctic.”
The U.S. currently has the medium icebreaker Healy, which is primarily used as a research vessel, and the heavy icebreaker Polar Star, which was refurbished in 2013 and will likely be retired again by 2023, analysts say. Most estimates agree that the Coast Guard needs three medium icebreakers and three heavy icebreakers, which cost about $1 billion each.
Even though the president is setting up a plan that would make good on his promise to begin building an icebreaker in 2020, King said there will be no net gain in the country’s icebreaker fleet. Since the new ship will come into the fleet at the same time or before the Polar Star retires, King said that at best the country will still only have one medium and one heavy icebreaker.
“I’m pleased it’s in the budget, that’s real progress, but I think we really need to be thinking about the second and third icebreakers because that’s really more where we need to go,” King said. “It’s an important point to make that this is not a new icebreaker, it’s a replacement for a ship that’ll be out of service by the time this ship enters the fleet.”
At worst, the country will have no heavy icebreakers in the early 2020s, analysts say. Russia has 20 to 30 ships with icebreaking capability, but tense relations between the two countries make it unlikely that the U.S. could use their capabilities in an emergency.
The Coast Guard is holding an industry day on March 18 in McLean, Va., to share requirements for a new icebreaker with shipbuilders. Katherine Blakeley, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said she expects “broad interest” among America’s shipyards.
A spokeswoman for Huntington Ingalls Industries, which builds the Coast Guard’s national security cutter, said the company is planning to send a few people to the industry day.
Holding this informational day-long meeting will ultimately spark designs and yield concrete costs for a new icebreaker, which are somewhat nebulous right now, Blakeley said. Getting shipyards interested and bidding for a contract to build the next icebreaker will also help get Congress onboard with actually appropriating the money the president asked for.
“If there’s an actual design contract and shipyards start saying yes we can build this icebreaker, then that can have the side effect of mobilizing congressional interest in states’ with these shipyards and the shipbuilding caucus,” she said.
Analysts as well as lawmakers are looking for ways to reduce the costs to make these ships a reality. Brian Slattery, an analyst with the Heritage Foundation, said he would encourage officials to look at buying foreign icebreakers, since U.S. shipyards haven’t built an icebreaker in decades and, as a result, have lost much of their capability and institutional memory.
But Blakeley said that, in addition to legal barriers, buying foreign would not create support in Congress the same way a ship built by constituents in someone’s home district would.
Joe Kasper, chief of staff for Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., said the congressman is pushing the Coast Guard to consider block buys to save money overall by promising to buy a certain number of ships. This is the way the Navy has tried to tackle expensive procurement projects like the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines and littoral combat ships.
In a tight budget environment, the extra money to invest in the icebreaker development must be cut from other programs. The Coast Guard had previously said that it would procure six fast response cutters a year to replace patrol craft leaving the fleet, but Slattery said the fiscal 2017 budget asks to buy only four of the ships.
The $150 million is just the initial investment in a ship expected to cost about $1 billion. Since this is Obama’s last budget, much of the responsibility will fall on the next administration to maintain the Arctic as one of the nation’s priorities.
King said it’s a fight he and his colleagues in the Senate are committed to.
“I think there are a number of us who are going to keep the pressure on the issue,” he said.
