The Coast Guard is ramping up its engagement with industry in the hopes of finalizing an acquisition strategy for a new heavy icebreaker by next spring, its top acquisition officer said Wednesday.
The service plans on hosting an industry day early next year to seek input from companies on technologies and potential designs for the vessel, said Rear Adm. Mike Haycock, Coast Guard director of acquisition programs and program executive officer.
Still unknown, however, is how the service will fund it. The $1 billion pricetag for a heavy icebreaker far outstrips the capacity of the Coast Guard’s annual budget, which is already constrained by the purchase of new offshore patrol cutters and recapitalizing its legacy fleet.
“We’re at about $1 billion, $1.2 billion annually for recapitalization, and the recapitalization we need in the Coast Guard is far greater [than that],” he said during a speech to the American Society of Naval Engineers. “We have aircraft that need to be recapitalized…We have other cutters that in dire need of recapitalization as well.”
The hope is to find a “whole of government solution” in which other agencies and military services will help pay for the vessel, Haycock said.
“The proof will be whether that materializes,” he said. To help generate interest, the Coast Guard created an integrated product team consisting of 11 governmental organizations, including the Marine Corps, Office of the Chief of Naval Operations and Naval Sea Systems Command, which have provided feedback on potential requirements.
None of them have volunteered funding thus far, but the Coast Guard plans to ask for more money for its own budget in the president’s fiscal year 2017 budget request to help accelerate acquisition activities, he told Defense Daily after the event.
The U.S. military has renewed its interest in the arctic in recent years as the melting of the polar icecaps has led to increased traffic in the region. But even though icebreakers are critical to support all Coast Guard missions except for undocumented migration and drug interdiction, the service only has three such vessels–and only two that are available for operations. Meanwhile, Russia owns 40 icebreakers, and plans to build more.
President Barack Obama during a September speech in Alaska said his administration would propose accelerating the procurement of a heavy icebreaker by two years, allowing production to start in 2020 instead of 2022 (Defense Daily, Sept. 1).
Department of Homeland Security approval of an operational requirements document could occur as early as January, Haycock said.
To drive down costs and speed up the development process, the Coast Guard wants to “leverage the work that’s already been done” both by industry and partner nations, he said. The service has interfaced with the Canadian government, for instance, but found that the U.S. requirements were significantly different because Canada has a shorter transit to the Arctic.
It also wants to evaluate the technologies and hull designs that have emerged since the Polar Sea and Polar Star were designed in the 1960s. Since then, emission standards and other regulations have changed. A new icebreaker could incorporate features that make it more efficient, maneuverable and powerful, such as a double hull, advances in propulsion, fixed pitch propellers, integrated power plants and advanced hull forms.
None of the requirements have been set in stone, but broadly speaking, the Coast Guard wants a vessel that can break 6 foot deep sheets of ice at 3 knots, Haycock said.
The icebreaker will also need to have some level of multi-mission capability, such as an oil skimming system and space, weight and power reservations.
“One of the problems we have in the Coast Guard is our fleet is relatively small compared to the Navy,” he said. “If you have an oil spill in the Arctic, who is going to be responsible? It’s going to be the Coast Guard.”
The Coast Guard needs a fleet of at least two heavy icebreakers and three medium icebreakers, he said. Those vessels would likely have different designs, but share common elements to keep costs low.
The service currently operates one heavy icebreaker, the Polar Star, which was reactivated in 2013 using parts cannibalized from the only other U.S. heavy icebreaker, Polar Sea. Polar Star recently started a voyage to Antarctica, while Polar Sea is laid up in Vigor Shipyard in Portland, Ore.
“The intent is to halt any degradation that’s going on in terms of corrosion and things of that nature” as well as to assess what it will take—both materially and financially—to bring Polar Sea back into service, if the Coast Guard decides to do that, he said.
The final icebreaker, the Healy, is a less capable medium-endurance vessel capable of breaking 4.5 feet of ice at 3 knots, he said.