Amid high north race, Coast Guard to seek green light soon to start building first new icebreaker

WASHINGTON — The US Coast Guard plans to seek approval from the Department of Homeland Security later this month to begin production of the lead ship in the Polar Security Cutter program, a major milestone for the first American icebreaker to be produced in decades.

Adm. Kevin Lunday, the Coast Guard’s vice commandant, told attendees at a Tuesday event hosted by the Center for Maritime Security the service is seeing a “significant increase in design maturity.”

“Bollinger [Shipyards] is learning quickly how to rebuild the knowledge base that disappeared since we hadn’t built an icebreaker in so long — but we are making progress and we are moving forward,” he said, referring to the program’s prime contractor.

The Polar Security Cutter is one of the Coast Guard’s top acquisition programs, and will see the design and construction of three new heavy icebreakers. The program has seen its share of challenges since inception — including one recent independent government watchdog warning the costs will skyrocket over Coast Guard projections — but the service’s current schedule projected the lead ship’s production would begin in 2024.

Icebreakers are a unique class of ship, and lead vessels are almost always more expensive than originally projected due to unexpected challenges during construction. Making PSC a particularly challenging build is the fact that, unlike submarines and destroyers, the United States hasn’t produced a new heavy icebreaker in decades, resulting in atrophy of the subset of the industrial base that once specialized in their construction.

At one point this past summer, the two American icebreakers that are still operational were both stuck in maintenance at a time the Coast Guard would have preferred to have a ship patrolling in the High North.

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In the meantime, the service has successfully acquired a commercially available icebreaker, Aiviq, which Lunday said has already been repainted and branded with US Coast Guard markings. He expects that ship to be “operational here shortly.”

In the background of all this, the United States has begun in earnest working with Canada and Finland on the new trilateral security agreement, ICE Pact, which seeks to bolster the icebreaking fleets of all three nations involved. It’s not clear what role or impact the agreement will have on the Polar Security Cutter program moving forward.