ARLINGTON, Virginia ─ The polar security cutter, the Coast Guard’s planned next-generation icebreaker, has an obstacle to break through before it can begin breaking ice ─ a lack of welders and engineers in the shipbuilding industry.
Rear Admiral Chad L. Jacoby, the assistant commandant for acquisition and chief acquisition officer for the Coast Guard, brought up that concern while giving an icebreaker update at the Surface Navy Association’s national symposium on Jan. 11.
“We have one polar icebreaker, the Polar Star, right now. It’s almost 50 years old. And it’s pretty much breaking up McMurdo [McMurdo Station, Antarctica] every year, so it’s fully occupied,” he said. As a class of one the Polar Star has zero redundancy, “but we are doing a service life extension on that in order to be able to use the Polar Star until we can build a polar security cutter.”
The service has authorized three prototype fabrication units, “so welding has started,” Jacoby said. “But it’s an interesting challenge. … the availability of trades and the availability of engineers. So, while we’re welding, and we need to ramp up very rapidly certified welders on this EQ47 steel, which is very hard to work with, we also need to advance the global design at a rate where they meet in the future and we can authorize production.”
Those are both challenges, he said, acknowledging, “we are behind.”
Across all Coast Guard construction programs, “every shipyard says they’re going to hire 1,000 or 2,000 more people in order to execute the contracts that we have in place. They all happen to be on the Gulf Coast, so if you add up all those numbers, it’s probably physically impossible for every one of those individual shipyards to hire 2,000 more people in order to meet the production rates that we’re asking for. So, we are bumping up against probably a physical limitation of the number of workers and engineers out there.”
The future polar security cutters aren’t just icebreakers, Jacoby said.
“You may have noticed that I called the existing ship an icebreaker. The future ship is a polar security cutter and the distinction there is the polar security cutter is going to do way more than break ice. If you’re familiar with the national security cutter, it will have national security cutter-level capabilities: sensors, equipment, on a hull that can go anywhere in the world in any season. So, we’re not just breaking ice, we’re not just having presence, we’re going to be able to execute almost all Coast Guard missions up in the Arctic, down in the Antarctic, anywhere in the world.”
