Time to fund new fleet of icebreakers

This editorial originally appeared in the Tuesday edition of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.

The U.S. need to augment its icebreaker fleet isn’t new. For years, Alaska leaders and members of the state’s delegation in Washington, D.C., have pushed for new additions to the minimal, aging group of vessels capable of patrolling Arctic waters. And while those efforts have been fruitful insofar as alerting the nation’s leadership that the U.S. has a need for greater icebreaker capacity, the sticking point — who will pay — has yet to be determined.

There’s been enough dickering over who will buy and operate the ships. It’s time to fund new icebreakers.

As it stands, the operational U.S. icebreaking fleet numbers a meager two — one of which is living on borrowed time. The Polar Star is the U.S. Coast Guard’s only working heavy icebreaker, and spends most of its time in the southern hemisphere on Antarctic missions. The other U.S. icebreaker, the medium-duty Healy, does what it can to patrol northern waters, perform rescue missions and protect U.S. interests in the Northwest Passage. Of the two, the Healy is healthier, only halfway through its 30-year design life. The Polar Star is now well past the threshold for which it was designed, having gone into service in the late 1970s. Still, it has fared better than its sister vessel, the Polar Sea, which suffered an engine failure in 2010 that ended its service.

It’s rare for the U.S. to be derelict in an area of strategic importance. The situation is especially puzzling given the proliferation of icebreakers operated by other Arctic nations. Canada operates six. Finland has seven. Denmark has five. Perhaps most sobering, perennial Arctic saber-rattler

Russia has nearly 40 — with eight more under

construction.

And yet Congress remains hesitant to help the U.S. catch up. “You’re not going to get the $1 billion from this Congress to build a new icebreaker. That’s simple. You’re not going to get it,” said Alaska’s own Rep. Don Young at a hearing in 2014. Frustratingly, all of the U.S. Arctic stakeholders — the Coast Guard, Navy, Department of Homeland Security and private industry — agree on the need for more icebreakers. But none will put their money where their mouths are.

On the part of the Coast Guard, that’s understandable — the approximately $1 billion necessary to build an icebreaker would represent about 10 percent of the agency’s total budget, and their sprawling mission also includes other needs like National Security Cutters, drug interdiction aircraft and watercraft.

But with regard to the U.S. Navy or Department of Homeland Security as a potential source of funding, those departments’ reticence is less forgivable. The Department of Homeland Security’s budget dwarfs that of the Coast Guard by a factor of about six. And the Navy’s budget is more than twice as large as both the Coast Guard and Department of Homeland Security put together.

The Navy and Department of Homeland Security’s hesitance stems largely from the fact that however new icebreakers are funded, they’re likely to be operated by the Coast Guard. But that wasn’t an impediment to the construction of the Polar Star and Polar Sea, which were built with Navy funds. The security, rescue and shipping needs of the Arctic are unquestionably more pronounced now than 40 years ago. There are no good excuses to delay funding and construction further.

This year, the U.S. took over at the helm of the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental group of polar nations that aims to help develop arctic policy. If America wants to show the council and the world it means to be a leader in the Arctic, it’s time to make the investment that will display that leadership. It’s time for the U.S. to build new

icebreakers.