The delivery of the US Coast Guard’s new heavy icebreaker has been postponed for a year

The U.S. Coast Guard has tacitly pushed back expectations of receiving their first new heavy-duty icebreaker, also known as the Polar Security Cutter, or PSC, from 2024 to 2025. This begs the question of whether the ship will be ready before USCGC Polar Star, the service’s only operational heavy icebreaker, is reaching the end of its viable life even after a planned major overhaul. The coast guard’s entire icebreaking capacity has become an increasingly pressing issue of national security in recent years, primarily due to the growing strategic importance of the Arctic and the potential for conflict there.

It is unclear when the PSC delivery schedule was delayed. A review of the archived copies of the Coast Guard’s official website for the program shows that the date there was updated sometime between September 27 and September 29. Admiral Karl Schultz, in command of the Coast Guard, had not given any scheduled date than when he expected the first in his prepared remarks at a service hearing in April. The year before, he had said that the first of these icebreakers could possibly be ready in 2023.

The US Navy, which runs the program together with the Coast Guard, awarded the first order for the lead PSC to VT Halter Marine in 2019. Year delay in the original schedule of three PSCs arriving in 2023, 2025 and 2026, respectively. According to the Navy and Coast Guard, “financial incentives for earlier delivery” were and will be included in the deal then and will continue to do so.

At the beginning of the year there were already indications of a new delay, which was due to the apparent shift in the schedule for the first steel cut for the ship. This milestone marks the beginning of the actual construction of a ship. As of this week, however, the first PSC is “still in the design phase” and VT Halter Marine is “working on completing the work necessary for construction to begin,” according to a Coast Guard statement to ArcticToday, the first to notice that the service had started To say 2025 instead of 2024 was now the expected delivery date.

It is unclear what problem or issues might be responsible for the new delay. The Coast Guard and Navy had tried to keep costs and deadline risk down by considering PSCs based on relatively mature parenting concepts. The offer from VT Halter Marine was derived from a planned ship, the Polarstern II, a planned ice-capable research ship for the German government. However, this program got into uncertainty last year when the German authorities canceled the tender for legal reasons.

“To what extent was the Polarstern II design developed by the time it was used as the overarching design for the development of the PSC design? The Congressional Research Service asked potential questions for American lawmakers in its report on the PSC program released in October that failed to mention the recent delay. “How closely is the design of the PSC related to the design of Polarstern II? How many changes were made to the design of Polarstern II to evolve the PSC design? What changes were they and what technical, timely and possibly? “

In January it was reported that VT Halter Marine was still preparing to build the first PSC. It is said to be one of the heaviest ships its Pascagoula, Mississippi shipyard has ever built, which has required new infrastructure that can handle this weight.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO), a Guardian of Congress, had previously raised concerns in its own report in 2018 about possible delays in the PSC program, also simply due to the general complexity of shipbuilding – any such deviation from plan would increase the risk that The Coast Guard is left with no heavy icebreakers operational. At that time, USCGC Polar Star was due to retire in 2020 as no major life extension plans were made.

In January, the Coast Guard announced it had awarded Mare Island Dry Dock, LLC, of ​​Vallejo, Calif., A contract worth up to $ 119.6 million to conduct a Service Life Extension Program (SLEP) to overhaul the Polar Star has granted. Based on the requirements set by Congress in the annual Defense Policy Bill or the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2021, this is expected to keep the ship operational until at least the end of 2025.

The problem with this is that Polar Star, which was first put into operation in 1976 and is very difficult to use and maintain, will still have to be out of service for at least some time while the SLEP work is being done and it will not be heavy Icebreaker take his place. Her sister ship USCGC Polar Sea is still in inventory, but has not been in service since 2010 and is now only a source of spare parts. The Coast Guard also has a single medium icebreaker, the USCGC Healy, but it is more restricted when compared to the Polar Star.

Another Coast Guard icebreaker, USCGC Mackinaw, is limited to operations in the Great Lakes and is not included in the billing of the service’s “major icebreakers” around the world. Various agencies in other parts of the U.S. government have also used and operated ice-capable ships owned by contractors in the past.

“By replacing obsolete, low-maintenance or high-maintenance equipment, the Coast Guard will reduce the risk of downtime due to unplanned maintenance or system failures,” said the service when the SLEP contract was announced earlier this year. “The contractually agreed SLEP work elements and the recurring maintenance will take place within a five-year, annually graduated production plan from 2021 to 2025. Each phase is coordinated in such a way that operational obligations such as Operation Deep Freeze are still met. “

Operation Deep Freeze is the nickname given for U.S. military support for U.S. government activities in Antarctica.

In June 2020, then-President Donald Trump ordered the Coast Guard to look into the possibility of buying nuclear-powered icebreakers, a type of ship currently only operated by Russia. Over the next month, Trump suggested there were new plans to acquire ten more icebreakers from an unspecified source. True or not, nothing has emerged since then to suggest that anyone seriously pursued such a proposal.

The video below shows the Russian nuclear icebreaker Arktika, which is currently the largest icebreaker of any kind in the world.