RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Senior Correspondent, International Affairs
0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. Turns out that when it comes to building icebreakers, the Arctic nation and superpower U.S. needs quite a lot of help from its friends.
Delays. Cost overruns. Not enough, or not the right, technologies and skilled industrial workers—seven years after the U.S. government commissioned the first heavy icebreakers in half-a-century from an American shipyard, not a single one is ready and the first of the three planned may not be until 2033 at the earliest, according to a scathing report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
It’s a similar picture in Canada, where, on Monday, the government announced a new program worth $11 billion to build six icebreakers for the Canadian Coast Guard. Prime Minister Mark Carney said the first ship would be ready by 2032 and the entire fleet by 2038.
America’s atrophy comes even as the Arctic becomes steadily more important, and contested, for reasons as diverse as climate and research, security and economics, and new technologies.
Counterintuitively, perhaps, things are a lot sunnier in northerly Finland than in the American South where traditional, major shipbuilders are located on the Gulf Coast.
Work began this year on the first of four Finnish-built new icebreakers for the U.S. that are expected to be ready fast—by the end of 2028.
"Finland traditionally has been a kind of superpower when it comes to building icebreakers," Robin Häggblom, a senior adviser at the Denmark-based company Risk Intelligence, told Newsweek .
About 60 percent of ice ships in the world were either built in Finland or according to Finnish designs. That skill is born of necessity since all of Finland’s ports regularly freeze over every winter.
So the U.S. finds itself in a humbling position: to maintain and expand its presence in the Arctic, it must learn from a small, European ally. Finland joined NATO in 2023 in the aftermath of neighbor Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
"For these kinds of polar Arctic capable icebreakers, there really isn't a know-how in the U.S., because, if you build a vessel every 50 years, you just can't keep the base of knowledgeable people both in the research development side but also in the workforce," said Häggblom, who also blogs as Corporal Frisk .
When the White House announced a deal last year to build up to 11 Arctic Security Cutters for the U.S. Coast Guard, the Finns were an integral part of the picture. The contracts are worth $6.8 billion and, in the main, involve two U.S. companies: Bollinger Shipyards, working with Finland’s Rauma Marine Constructions; and Davie Defense, with the Helsinki Shipyard.
After the first ships are built in Finland, the technology and skills will be transferred to the U.S., the demandeur or weaker partner, the learner in this arrangement.
The need for the cutters is urgent. To Häggblom, it’s a kind of across-the-political-spectrum no-brainer.
"If you're looking at a kind of progressive-conservative scale, from a progressive point of view, climate change, research around the changing face of the Arctic where global heating is shaping the landscape much faster than it does in some other places, this is a really interesting and, in many places, urgent factor that needs study," said Häggblom.
"Also, the melting Arctic and developing technologies mean that raw materials found in the Arctic, both minerals and energy resources, are becoming more accessible in places that just five or 10 years ago perhaps there wouldn’t have been a market case for developing them," Häggblom added.
Then there is hard security: the transpolar route is simply the shortest one between the Russian mainland and the U.S. mainland, making the Arctic vital from an air defense as well as nuclear weapons scenario point of view for the U.S., he said.
Russia is a perennial presence in the Arctic, with by far the longest coastline of the eight Arctic states . It has the most icebreakers of any country, numbering dozens. Finland built some of those, too.
The U.S. also has a substantial Arctic coastline in Alaska of 1,000 or 2,500 miles, depending if you count point to point or include the total shoreline, but only about two icebreakers suitable for polar activities operational at any one time.
Non-Arctic China is also probing the region in multiple ways from climate and military-connected research to shipping as Newsweek has regularly reported . It has about half-a-dozen icebreakers, an active building program, and its ships regularly travel through both the Arctic and Antarctica.
Chinese company Sea Legend is currently testing a potential first, regular, commercial cargo service from Asia along the Russian coast and through Arctic’s Northeastern Passage. The Liberia-flagged Dubai Tower is currently in the Bering Sea, aiming to arrive in Teesport in Britain on September 7, having departed Qingdao port on August 19, according to Marine Traffic website. That’s fast compared to traveling through the Suez Canal and bypassing critical and potentially geopolitically risky choke-points such as the Strait of Malacca or the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.
"So, regardless of your world view, you will find something that makes the Arctic of today more interesting today than it was a decade ago," said Häggblom.
Yet, right at this crucial moment, "the U.S. capability to be able to support different kinds of ventures in the Arctic is really going down," he said. "The U.S. clearly has let their Arctic capability atrophy."
Newsweek contacted the builder, Bollinger Shipyards, the U.S. company headquartered in Louisiana, for comment, but did not hear back.
Häggblom called the Arctic Security Cutter program "one of the more sensible programs, to be quite frank, right now," comparing it to the Golden Dome Arctic defense program or...
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