Why the U.S. can't build icebreaking ships

An interesting summary, but I don't think the article really answered the headline. In particular, I'm left wondering which is the bigger problem: Is it that the US ship builders aren't competent and have turned what should have been a fairly straightforward modification of an existing design into a huge boondoggle, or is it that the government requirements are poorly thought out and/or overly ambitious, resulting in costly redesign efforts that aren't really necessary?

Put another way, are we spending all this time and money to fail at simply building a ship that is functionally identical to one of these ~$300m Finnish ice breakers, or are we claiming we need something more sophisticated?

> ... allowing the Coast Guard to buy icebreakers from Finland would likely save over a billion dollars per ship, as well as years of construction time

How about we let Finland build the icebreakers, and we build something we're good at, like fighter planes? Then everyone gets the best and most efficiently built icebreakers and fighter planes, and all for much less money.

There is no [edit: economic] logic to economic nationalism, other than as wealth transfer from taxpayers to a few wealthy people.

> We also see the same cultural issues that we saw with American shipbuilding more broadly. There seems to be a lack of motivation to take maritime issues seriously or treat them as important.

This is the meat of the article in my mind. The US has globalized away its maritime industry in general and we now lack the institutional knowledge, infrastructure, and labor force needed to operate even semi-independently on the maritime front. Just look at our domestic shipbuilding capacity vs. China: https://www.americanmanufacturing.org/blog/chinas-shipbuildi...

WA state has the same problem trying to get ferries built for the Puget sound. Every decade the fleet gets more dilapidated and the replacements get more expensive and farther behind schedule. The legislature has ditched the requirements that the boats be built at a WA shipyard and they still can't find builders.

Why can't we just have a technology transfer agreement? Purchase the ships from Finland but make them at a US shipyard? Other countries do that with US defense manufacturers all the time. Purchase items, but with the condition that it will be manufactured in that country.

So in short the US only builds a tiny number of them once every two to three decades, so nobody has any experience. And letting someone with experience build them is out of the question because then it wouldn't be built in the US.

This seems like a reoccurring story when talking about anything vaguely infrastructure related in the US.

Now that Finland is a member of NATO, it would make sense to outsource icebreakers to Finland. Finland has 64 F-35 jets on order from the US, costing more than a few icebreakers.

VT Halter Marine, the troubled US contractor, went bust and was sold in 2022.

I'm afraid this might be too much of a stupid question (and I promise I'm not American), but can't they just shoot at the ice as they go?

I can recommend The Terror first season series, despite its shortcomings, for a beautiful depiction of the struggle of breaking through the north passage in the mid 1800s.

As with Healy's fire leaving the US without an icebreaker this summer, this week a grounding apparently left the US Navy without an oiler in the Middle East[1]. Similar systemic shipbuilding challenges and fragility.

[1] https://gcaptain.com/us-navy-oiler-usns-big-horn-aground-for...

My thought when I read things outlining American industrial and infrastructural woes is "What in the world is to be done about this?" As far as I can tell, protectionism doesn't seem to work, and globalism doesn't seem to work. I'd just like to hear a coherent plan on how a country should get out of this situation.

The article didn’t mention Canada’s role in the Arctic. While the American icebreaker fleet has been diminished, Canada’s is relatively strong. Our coast guard currently has a fleet of twenty, and tenders were just awarded for two polar icebreakers.

So it’s not like the Arctic is totally empty - a NATO partner has a bigger presence.

"Why Johnny can't read" has become "Why the US can't build X" it seems.

Peter Zeihan too talks about how USA is perfectly suited to have transport boats on its waterways but because of the Jones Act and lack of US shipbuilding we have to use trucks and rail which not only are clogging our roads but are much more expensive as well.

> The culprit here isn’t the Jones Act, but another protectionist shipbuilding law that requires Naval and Coast Guard ships to be built in U.S. shipyards.

Now this is a surprise! As soon as I read the headline, I thought "Jones Act."

When I describe the Jones Act to people, the usual response is "That can't be right," or even "I don't believe you," but these days there's usually another person around that can say "Yes, that's actually right!" to back me up.

It's a good example of protectionism, like tariffs, that is completely ineffective. The industrial policy of the IRA and CHIPS acts are in contrast quite effective.

Does this say anything concerning about the US ability to produce warships?

Scaling up shipbuilding in wartime demands skilled labour and construction facilities. To say nothing of the material inputs.

Because it considers manufacturing to be something poor nations do, and prefers to extract wealth through printing reserve currency and other forms of financial trickery.

I always felt that Erkanoplans were superior for traveling over ice, especially now that they can be made with carbon fiber

> In fact, no existing U.S. shipyard has built a heavy > polar icebreaker since before 1970.

What does since before mean?

We have simply accreted too many regulations and special interest groups like barnacles.

Kind of pointless comparing Russian icebreaker number to anyone elses'. Russia is basically a huge pile of snow next to a huge floating pile of ice (geographically, not population-wise, but still). Nobody has even 10% of motivation for building icebreakers that Russia has.

We can, but we just won't invest the funds, meanwhile Russia and China will dominate as the ice melts. This is a lack of will and not lack of ability, I hate it when people act like the USA is a POS in blog articles.

I think the USA is overdue an ideological renewal. Free market, neoliberal capitalism isn't cutting it. The profit incentive isn't cutting it. Supply chains where it takes hundreds of contractors and subcontractors to build anything aren't cutting it.

We see this in Boeing, where management with an ideology of profit maximization and a structure dependent on a bunch of suppliers has led to a crisis. On the other side of the Pacific, BYD has vertically integrated critical parts of car manufacturing and now is moving extremely quickly and affordably.

Another example; the Federal Government invested billions on banks in 2008, billions into the auto industry in 2009, is now investing billions into Intel, but refuses to take any shares for some reason. It has this ideology of investing billions in the private sector to save industries key to national interest, but "state owning shares is spooky so we want nothing in return". It seems so backwards to me.

If the industry is that important to the country, maybe at least have a seat at the board of directors? You don't have no nationalize anything, but at least be in the same room. Other countries, from China to France, have demonstrated there's a lot of value in this state-private sector joint ownership.

I don't know what the right answer is, but the current status quo seemingly ain't it— not just in execution, but in ideology. Something fundamental is non-ideal.

Honestly, with how quickly sea ice and glaciers are melting away, I don't think icebreakers will be something we would necessarily need in the near future.