In an ambitious effort to counter Chinese and Russian influence in the High North, the U.S., Canada and Finland have created a resource-pooling plan to help meet a projected demand for as many as 90 icebreakers among allied nations over the next decade. These vessels offer a critical capability in a region with increasing strategic significance.
The Icebreaker Collaboration Effort, or ICE Pact, seeks to significantly boost shipbuilding by its signatories. The three-pronged agreement calls for enhanced trilateral information exchange, collaboration on workforce development; and an invitation to allies and partners to purchase icebreakers built in American, Canadian, or Finnish shipyards. A memorandum of understanding will be drawn up by year’s end to spell out the roles of each nation in this effort, which relies on building at scale to reduce costs. This is a particularly critical issue for the U.S. considering it has only two icebreakers and is struggling to build more. Russia alone has more icebreakers than all three nations combined.
The announcement came during the NATO Summit in Washington D.C. to send a message to China and Russia that the U.S. and its allies plan to compete in the North and work together to make that happen.
“This is a strategic imperative,” a senior U.S. official told reporters on Wednesday. ”Polar icebreakers are exactly the kind of high-complexity, high-tech market segment in which America is well-positioned to thrive and lead, particularly with added expertise in technology. And this will help build out our industrial capacity but also provide benefits to our Allies, consistent with the message you’ve been hearing this week at the NATO Summit.”
Icebreakers provide a presence where other ships can’t go and help pave the way so they can. The growing need for them is spurred by melting ice coverage that opens up new lanes of shipping up north, adding additional competition for influence on the water and the potential natural resources lying below the surface. As a result, the Arctic region is increasingly becoming a potential flashpoint. It has seen significant investment in military resources, especially by Russia, which is massively expanding its aviation facilities at Nagurskoye Air Base, adjacent to its large Arctic Trefoil outpost.
Russia is also developing closer ties with China in the Arctic. The two nations signed a memorandum of understanding last year “to strengthen their collaboration and their joint operations in the region,” the official said. Though China is nearly 2,000 miles from the Arctic, it declared itself a near-Arctic nation in a 2018 whitepaper dubbing its interest in the region the “Polar Silk Road” economic initiative.
“For China, regular use of the Northern Route would be an economic boon,” noted the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). “The distance from Shanghai to German ports is over 4,600km (about 2,900 miles) shorter via the Northern Route than via the Suez Canal.”
Beijing and Moscow have put their burgeoning cooperation to sea, sparking heightened concerns in the U.S. Last year, a joint Chinese-Russian flotilla sailing near Alaska’s Aleutian Islands added weight to calls for the U.S. to establish a permanent naval base in Alaska. While the U.S. Air Force has multiple sprawling bases in the state, there is currently no permanent base from which to station naval vessels there. In another indication of the growing importance of the region, elements of the U.S. Army’s elite 160th Special Operation Aviation Regiment, also known as the Night Stalkers, last year trained to help defend Alaska’s Shemya Island, a highly strategic outpost that would be high on any Russian or Chinese target list in the event of armed conflict. You can read more about that here.
Against this backdrop, ICE Pact aims for the U.S., Canada, and Finland to expand their collective ability to build icebreakers for themselves and allied nations and to share capacity, workers, and technical expertise to spread out the financial and infrastructure burdens.
“Due to the capital intensity of shipbuilding, long-term, multi-ship order books are essential to the success of a shipyard,” the White House said in a statement announcing the pact.
“If we’re trying to build a long-term order book to create the demand signal we need to have the investment that’s required to generate scale,” a senior U.S. official told reporters on Wednesday. “What we’re trying to do is to leverage the global order book. And our sense is if we look at Allied nations that are trying to purchase icebreakers over the next decade, it’s 70 to 90 vessels.”
The ICE Pact nations have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to the number of hulls designed specifically to operate in the harsh polar climes. All three lag far behind Russia in the number of icebreakers. Russia alone has 36, including a new Project 23550 combat icebreaker that further highlights the Arctic arms race. It has more icebreakers in production. In comparison, Finland has 12 and Canada has nine, according to The Associated Press, citing U.S. Coast Guard data.
The U.S., as we noted earlier, has just two. Only one, the Polar Star, is considered a heavy icebreaker. The U.S. hasn’t built a new icebreaker in more than 50 years.
China is adding icebreakers to its massive shipbuilding efforts. It is constructing a new heavy icebreaker and a new heavy-lift semi-submersible vessel capable of salvaging and rescuing vessels in the Arctic, according to a Brookings report.
“This would supplement their two existing icebreakers and be in addition to reports of their development of a nuclear-powered icebreaker,” Brookings noted.
The disparity in such vessels – which help keep waterways open for American national security interests, commerce, and research – is not lost on U.S. military leaders charged with defending the North.
“We’re severely outnumbered,” Air Force Gen. Gregory M. Guillot, the Commander of the U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), testified before the Senate Arms Services Committee in March. “We do appreciate that the Coast Guard is procuring more icebreakers. But even with those, we will be severely outnumbered. And that does limit our freedom of maneuver in that region.”
That procurement timeline, however, continues to stretch out to the right.
Work on a new class of Polar Security Cutter (PSC) heavy icebreakers for the Coast Guard has suffered substantial delays, with the first of those ships now potentially not set to be delivered until 2028. The contract for the lead PSC vessel was awarded in 2019 to VT Halter Marine, since purchased by Bollinger Shipyards. The service’s only operational heavy icebreaker, the USCGC Polar Star, is becoming increasingly difficult to operate and maintain.
To help mitigate that shortfall, the U.S. Coast Guard’s main contracting office put out a public notice in March about the service’s intent to purchase a “domestically produced, commercially available icebreaker” from shipbuilding and marine services company Offshore Service Vessels (which does business as Edison Chouest Offshore) via a sole-source contract. An updated version of the notice stated “objective” of this acquisition is “to provide an operational surface asset capable of projecting U.S. presence in the Arctic.”
You can read more about that in our deep dive here.
ICE Pact is a tacit acknowledgment that the three nations cannot by themselves produce a requisite number of icebreakers.
“Right now, it’s too small, it’s taking too long, and we’re not generating the production that we need.,” the official stated about U.S. icebreaker fleet. “So we’re trying to break that current equilibrium. Without this arrangement, we’d risk our adversaries developing an advantage in a specialized technology with vast geostrategic importance.”
Not taking action could “also allow them to become the preferred supplier for countries that also have an interest in purchasing polar icebreakers.”
So far, the U.S. has invested nearly $2 billion for its icebreaker program of record, the official explained.
“The shipbuilder for that program has made additional capital expenditures on top of that,” the official added. “The scale that we want to build out, it could cost as much as $10 billion to fully deploy the fleet that we want.”
While offering no specific numbers, the official said “the targets are multiples of what we currently have in our fleet.”
As if to drive home the need for this, the Coast Guard said it “encountered multiple People’s Republic of China military ships in the Bering Sea, Saturday and Sunday.”
“All four of the People’s Republic of China vessels were transiting in international waters but still inside the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone, which extends 200 nautical miles from the U.S. shoreline,” the service said in a media release on Wednesday.
“The Chinese naval presence operated in accordance with international rules and norms,” said Rear Adm. Megan Dean, Seventeenth Coast Guard District commander. “We met presence with presence to ensure there were no disruptions to U.S. interests in the maritime environment around Alaska.”
The call for more icebreakers comes as U.S. overall shipbuilding efforts pale in comparison to China’s
According to a Navy briefing slide that emerged online last year, China’s shipyards can produce orders of magnitude more vessels than the U.S. can. You can read more about that here.
Even before the end of the Cold War, America’s ability to build ships was in decline. It has steadily shrunk even more since and is now at a nadir across the board.
Despite that, as the ice packs melt the need for icebreakers will only increase. ICE Pact hopes to help the U.S. and its allies close the yawning advantage their adversaries have in the polar regions.
Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com