As the United States and Russia eye new shipping routes in the melting Arctic, political and military leaders in Washington are pointing to a crucial gap in the one type of vessel that can turn frozen waters into reliable lanes for commerce or national defense.

Icebreakers — the ships that smash through sea ice, opening routes for other craft and rescuing trapped vessels — are increasingly important to navigating in the far north. Russia has 40 of them, including nuclear-powered craft painted an intimidating red and black.

Meanwhile, the U.S. icebreaker fleet? Two.

Or three, if you count the aging vessel in a Seattle drydock being cannibalized for parts.

“The highways of the Arctic are icebreakers. Right now the Russians have superhighways and we have dirt roads with potholes,” said Freshman Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska.

Though much of President Barack Obama’s visit to the Arctic this week focuses on the region’s environment and its people, the larger backdrop is that the polar region is becoming the subject of intense negotiations among Arctic nations over commerce and resources, and growing tension driven by its potential strategic importance.

Nearly a quarter of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas may lie under the Arctic seabed; for commercial shippers, the opening of the Northern Sea Route would shorten voyages between China and Europe. Russia held massive military exercises in the Arctic earlier this year, and both countries have national Arctic strategies that identify icebreakers as key to their ambitions, according to Victoria Herrmann, the U.S. director of the Arctic Institute.

But Russia is far better prepared: in addition to its 40 active ships, it has six more under construction and two more planned beyond that, according to numbers compiled by the Arctic Institute’s Ryan Uljua, who is cobbling together an inventory of the world’s icebreakers.

It might seem that a warming Arctic would require less icebreaking, not more. But as northern waters become more accessible, far more ship traffic will be at risk, and their shifting climate conditions make it more likely seas will freeze unpredictably.

Though it remains far down the US priority list, the icebreaker deficit has been crackling onto Washington’s radar. At a recent National Press Club event, Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Paul Zukunft called for more icebreakers; in late July, Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) pressed new Navy chief Adm. John Richardson about icebreakers during his confirmation hearing. “I think it’s a serious problem that we’re going to have to really put some attention to it,” King said. [UPDATE: President Obama joined them this morning, saying the US should start building new icebreakers.]

The icebreaker gap is also exposing some deeper problems that speak to the long neglect of the issue. Not only are they expensive, costing at least $1 billion each, but it would take the U.S. shipbuilding industry – which has long ceased to build icebreakers -- at least ten years to build a brand new one.

Russia’s icebreaker fleet includes formidable nuclear icebreakers like the Rossiya, shown here after escorting a submarine mission to the North Pole. | AP Photo | AP Photo



And it’s unclear who would pay for the next generation. Icebreakers are operated by the Coast Guard, but their cost falls way outside the reach of its budget. Funding them, said Zukunft, is the “billion-dollar question.”

At its height, the U.S. icebreaker fleet hovered around eight ships, comparable to that of other Arctic countries like Canada, Finland and Sweden. But the Coast Guard’s robust fleet dropped out of commission one by one, and today consists of one 40-year-old heavy icebreaker, the Polar Star, commissioned in 1976, and one medium icebreaker, the Healy, commissioned in 2000. The Polar Star’s sister ship, the Polar Sea, has been sitting in a drydock in Seattle since its engine failed in 2010.

Though icebreakers are crucial for defense, Arctic drilling, and research, they have an important role in civilian life too. In December 2011, the people of the remote and icebound city of Nome, Alaska, were running short on heating fuel. The water in the Norton Sound froze solid, blocking an emergency delivery by a Russian tanker. The U.S. Coast Guard scrambled to reroute its nearest icebreaker: the Healy, on its way to Seattle for some much needed rest. The Healy turned around and slowly broke open a path for the tanker, which reached Nome in January.

If the Healy had also gotten stuck or broken down, the Coast Guard had no plan B. Its two other icebreakers were out of commission, one retired and one in drydock with a catastrophic engine failure – and the citizens of Nome would have been trapped. “We were just lucky in that particular case,” former Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Robert Papp, who is now the State Department’s special representative to the Arctic, told POLITICO.

“Unfortunately, I think the thing that will get people serious about the need to have a national icebreaking fleet is going to be a disaster and loss of life…” said retired Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead, chairman of the Arctic Security Working Group at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute. “It will be a cruise ship that becomes icebound and sinks, or some destination shipping that sinks and results in loss of life and environmental disaster. Then we will be in a ‘who shot John’ mode at that point.”

The Department of Homeland Security issued a mission statement in 2013 specifically citing the need for polar icebreakers. The agency determined the Coast Guard needs three heavy icebreakers – capable of breaking through up to 21 feet of ice – and three medium icebreakers, which can tackle eight feet of ice, in order to meet U.S. icebreaking capability.

Today, it has one heavy and one light. The heavy ship is the Polar Star — which only has about six to eight more years of service life left — can’t take on missions in the Arctic, according to Zukunft, because it’s fully committed for five years to liberating Antarctica’s McMurdo Sound for the National Science Foundation from November to April, then returns for maintenance from May to October.

The ships require thick steel, reinforced hulls and enormous horsepower to ram through ice. Icebreakers also have special onboard tanks and pumps that shift water from one side of the boat, rocking it to break the surrounding ice. The Coast Guard’s total budget request for fiscal 2016 is $9.96 billion; a single icebreaker would eat a tenth of the budget.

Some would like to see the other beneficiaries of icebreakers, like the Navy or the National Science Foundation, help to fund them. The Healy, Papp noted, was paid for using entirely Navy funding.

Zukunft said in order to get funding for icebreakers outside of the Coast Guard budget, the vessels would need to be seen as national assets—in the same light as aircraft carriers and nuclear ballistic submarines. “At the end of the day it really is a national asset, where it’s not just Coast Guard, it’s the National Science Foundation, the Arctic Research Council, the Department of the Interior, Transportation, Defense Department, Commerce, a number of others, that have equities in heavy icebreakers,” he said.

Alaskan senator Lisa Murkowski, who’s led the charge for new icebreakers for years, wants to see the Navy and Coast Guard partner to fund the ships. “Do you know how many naval ships we are building? A lot,” she said. “Do you know how many icebreakers we are building? None.”

But even if funding to build new icebreakers came tomorrow, it would still take too long to build one ship, analysts say. Current law requires Coast Guard vessels to be constructed in U.S. shipyards unless the President determines there’s an overriding national-security interest to build a ship outside of the U.S.

Lockheed Shipbuilding of Seattle, Washington, which built the Polar Star and the Polar Sea, is closed. So is Avondale Industries outside of New Orleans, which built the Healy. One privately owned icebreaker, leased to Shell, was built by a pair of domestic shipbuilders. “But the domestic industry is kind of thin,” Uljua said. He estimated that building a new vessel stateside would take at least 10 years, and crafting a design alone could take several years. Another option would be leasing a ship, though according to Uljua, there are no heavy icebreakers available to lease; one would have to be built.

Zukunft said it’s also possible for a stateside shipbuilder to take a commercial off-the-shelf design from a different country and build the vessel in the U.S. Canada, for example, has a design for a heavy icebreaker and the U.S. is exploring the possibility of partnering with the country to build icebreakers, he said.

The Coast Guard is conducting a study, not yet public, examining Canadian and Finnish companies’ ability to construct an icebreaker, according to Uljua, who said one firm in Helsinki, Finland — Aker Arctic —has designed 60 percent of the world’s icebreakers.

But the Hoover Institute’s Roughead was skeptical that bringing a foreign country into the mix would work. “I don’t see the shipbuilding industry and shipbuilding interests agreeing to that, but I do think you could save some money and indeed time.”

For now, however, money remains the first sticking point. Sen. Sullivan said he co-sponsored an amendment with Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) that would authorize $4 million in fiscal 2016 and $10 million in fiscal 2017 to look at the feasibility of a new polar icebreaker.

Within the Homeland Security spending bill for fiscal 2016, Sen. Murkowski said, there is a request for $6 million to conduct a material condition assessment for the out-of-commission Polar Sea—though Murkowski is skeptical the damaged ship will ever make it back into the water.

Murkowski said she’s heartened that senators from warmer U.S. regions finally appear to be thinking about the problem, Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain and colleagues as far south as Florida have told her they’re interested in the issue. Murkowski added that Alabama Republican Sen. Richard Shelby has called for new icebreakers in a recent appropriations hearing.

Sullivan said he hopes President Obama “sees the potential in the Arctic and announces more resources to bolster our lackluster icebreaker fleet” after he visits Alaska for the GLACIER Conference next week.

Beneath all the wrangling over money and logistics, the debate over icebreakers gets at the bigger question of how America sees itself. With so much focus on the Middle East, the “pivot to Asia,” and the threat of Russian aggression in Eastern Europe, it’s easy to forget the potential of the north.

“I’ve been out there on my lonely crusade for so long now,” Murkowski said. Her attempts to fund icebreakers, she added, have been “viewed as an Alaska earmark, and that is so far from the case … I have been standing at the top of the mountains saying, ‘ We have to have icebreaking capacity. We are an Arctic nation.’”



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