Posted on August 5, 2024
Canada’s largest shipbuilder, Davie, is inspecting sites and seeking a U.S. partner “to make a long-term commitment to American shipbuilding” and expand its capacity, the White House announced this week.
This was just one of the Biden administration’s announcements on expanding domestic shipbuilding following the July 11 agreement reached among the United States, Canada and Finland to create the Icebreaker Collaboration Effort, or “Ice PACT,” to work together to build icebreakers and share technology with other allies and partners.
In a media release, Davie said it “is building the world’s largest order book of heavy icebreakers for Canada. It also owns Helsinki Shipyard in Finland, which has built more than half of the icebreakers working today.
With only aged heavy icebreaker USCGC Polar Star (WAGB-10) and medium icebreaker USCGC Healy (WAGB-20) still in service, Congress has in the past five years paid increasingly close attention to the need to build or buy others to replace the two.
While the Arctic had been a region with little economic and military activity, it has become strategically important, particularly to Russia in developing and exporting gas and oil produced there and militarily to base its Northern Fleet.
Russia deploys 50 icebreakers, including two heavy nuclear-powered ships. Its others are diesel-electric or diesel. China, which depends on energy largely from Russia, fields two primarily for Arctic and Antarctic scientific research and is finishing a third icebreaker this year, with a fourth due in 2025.
But the plan to build a replacement for Polar Star and expand the number of U.S.-flagged icebreakers has been plagued by long delays in design, the COVID-19 pandemic and major cost overruns. The United States has not produced a heavy icebreaker in almost half a century or commissioned a medium one in a quarter century.
For 20 years, Congress has appropriated no money to build icebreakers.
At an Armed Services Committee hearing on Northern Command earlier this year, Sen. Angus King, (I-Maine) said not having enough icebreakers to meet the needs of a warming climate and security environment is like “not having a road to get where you need to get.”
Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) joined King in calling this a “gap” that must be closed.
In May, the General Accountability Office reported to Congress that “the design of the Polar Security Cutter, a heavy icebreaker, is more complex and taking over three years longer than expected—delaying delivery of the lead ship by about five years. And the program’s costs increased by more than $2 billion due to these challenges.”
Eric Labs, a senior analyst in the Congressional Budget Office, told the House Subcommittee on Transportation and Maritime Security the $5.1 billion price tag is “60 percent greater than the Coast Guard’s most recent publicly released estimate for the procurement cost of three heavy icebreakers, which was provided to CBO by the Coast Guard in March 2024.”
The first polar security cutter originally was projected for delivery this year. The design was supposed to be based on a German research vessel and the propulsion would be based on a Finnish model.
That never happened.
Artist’s Rendering of Coast Guard Polar Security Cutter
The Congressional Research Service warned that “if substantial cost growth occurs in the PSC program, it could raise a question regarding whether to grant some form of contract relief to the PSC shipbuilder.”
Then-Commandant of the Coast Guard Adm. Karl Schultz was optimistic in 2020 that “steel-cutting [for the Polar Security Cutter] would begin next year.” He also saw possibilities to speed the process along in having the service lease icebreakers until new ones were delivered.
Although leasing may be a dead issue, buying used remains a bridging option, as was done for Alaska in 2024.
While a polar security cutter was not in the Fiscal Year 2025 budget request, Commandant Adm. Linda Fagan said at her state of the service address in March the program was still her top acquisition priority.
The Coast Guard has already received full funding for the first two ships in previous budgets.
“This is the first new heavy icebreaker constructed in the United States since the 1970s,” Fagan said. “And as an Arctic nation, a new polar security cutter is critical to creating persistent presence in the high latitudes.”
The polar security cutter builder now is Bollinger – the largest private American shipyard. Headquartered in Louisiana, Bollinger bought the original contract holder VT Halter in late 2022, and construction will be done in Pascagoula, Miss.
Ben Bordelon, Bollinger Shipyards president and CEO, said “we have made, and will continue to make, significant, long-term investments in our facilities, infrastructure and workforce. Our goal is to create a world-class American-owned shipyard capable of producing the first fleet of American-made polar icebreakers in over half a century.”
“Building icebreakers is hard,” Iris Ferguson, the principal deputy secretary of defense for the Arctic and a key author of the new regional strategy, said at the Wilson Center last week. Allied cooperation “is not only for icebreakers,” she said, but also to meet the goals of the Arctic strategy and administration’s National Security Strategy.
In making the announcement of Davie’s interest in partnering in the United States, the White House emphasized that this was one section in future “collaboration with our allies and partners” in shipbuilding, its supply chain and ports.
Davie, established in Quebec in 1825, also has been involved in supporting U.S. yards in building Nimitz-class carriers and Arleigh Burke-class destroyers.
