US Pushes to Expand Icebreaker Fleet
August 18, 2008
International Herald Tribune
A growing array of American military leaders, Arctic experts and lawmakers say the United States is losing its ability to patrol and safeguard Arctic waters even as climate change and high energy prices have triggered a burst of shipping and oil and gas exploration in the thawing region.
In the meantime, a resurgent Russia has been busy expanding its fleet of large ocean-going icebreakers to about 14, launching a large conventional icebreaker in May and, last year, the world's largest icebreaker, named 50 Years of Victory, the newest of its seven nuclear-powered, pole-hardy ships.
The U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Coast Guard and others have warned over the last several years that the United States' two 30-year-old heavy icebreakers, the Polar Sea and Polar Star, and one smaller ice-breaking ship devoted mainly to science, the Healy, are grossly inadequate. Also, the Polar Star is out of service.
And this spring, the leaders of the Pentagon's Pacific Command, Northern Command and Transportation Command strongly recommended in a letter that the Joint Chiefs of Staff endorse a fresh push by the Coast Guard to increase the United States' ability to gain access to and control its Arctic waters.
Admiral Thad Allen, the commandant of the Coast Guard, who toured Alaska's Arctic shores two weeks ago with the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, said that whatever mix of natural and human factors is causing the ice retreats, the Arctic is clearly opening to commerce - and potential conflict and hazards - like never before.
"All I know is, there is water where it didn't used to be, and I'm responsible for dealing with that," Allen said. Given the eight or 10 years it would take to build even one icebreaker, he added, "I think we're at a crisis point on making a decision."
The cost of building icebreakers and keeping the older vessels operating until the new ones have been launched could easily top $1.5 billion, according to several estimates. Arguments for new ships include the strategic, like maintaining a four-seasons ability to patrol northern waters, and the practical, like being able to quickly reach a disabled cruise ship or an oil spill in ice-clogged waters, Allen said.
Shipping traffic in the far north is not tracked precisely. But experts provided telling snapshots of maritime activity to legislators and other officials from Arctic countries at an international conference last week in Fairbanks, Alaska. For example, Mead Treadwell, who attended the conference and is an Alaskan businessman and the chairman of the research commission, said officials were told that the number of cruise ship voyages around Greenland topped 200 in 2007, up from just 27 in 2004.
The growing Pentagon support for the Coast Guard, which is within the Department of Homeland Security, followed several highly publicized maneuvers by Russia aimed at cementing its position as the Arctic's powerhouse, including sending a pair of small submarines to the seabed at the North Pole just over a year ago.
White House officials said they have been reviewing Arctic policies for several years and were nearly finished with a new security policy on the region - the first since 1994. Bush administration officials said last week that it could be issued within a few weeks, but they declined to discuss what it would say.
The enduring question is where the money would come from to rehabilitate the older ships and build new ones. The Department of Homeland Security is still mainly focused on preventing terrorist attacks. The Coast Guard is stretched thin, Allen said, with units protecting facilities in the Gulf, trying to interdict drug smuggling and patrolling coastal waters elsewhere.
In Congress, the issue has mainly been championed by lawmakers from Alaska and Washington state. The Polar Sea, Polar Star and Healy are based in Seattle.
