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President plans to order 40 large icebreakers, but shipbuilding industry has been declining for decades.
At 13,000 tons, the U.S. Coast Guard’s Polar Star is a mammoth vessel made to crash through Arctic ice more than 20 feet thick. But it is the U.S.’s only icebreaker that operates year-round, and it was built nearly half a century ago.
In the intensifying global race to access the Arctic, icebreakers are the essential tool to open trade routes, allow resource extraction and project military power. The U.S. and its allies have fallen far behind Russia, and China is rapidly gaining ground with the help of the world’s largest shipbuilding industry.
President Trump has signaled that he wants to put the Arctic back at the top of the U.S.’s priority list. He has said the U.S. needs to take ownership of Greenland for national security and that the Coast Guard will expand its fleet of icebreakers.
“We’re going to order about 40 Coast Guard big icebreakers. Big ones,” Trump said last month.
That will be a tall order to fill. The U.S. has been struggling for years to build a single icebreaker—vessels that clear a path through the ice for other ships. Even if Trump is able to marshal the political will and money to build more, the U.S. will have to breathe life back into its ailing shipbuilding industry , which has been in decline for decades.
Russia, meanwhile, has around 40 icebreakers capable of operating in polar conditions, as well as new giant nuclear-powered ones under construction. Despite being 900 miles from the Arctic Circle, China has four such vessels. Its first domestically built nuclear-powered icebreaker could be unveiled as soon as this year, experts say.
Russia has faced setbacks in recent years. Sanctions over the Ukraine war have limited its access to components and technologies needed to build icebreakers, such as propulsion systems and radar equipment. A nuclear-powered icebreaker under construction called Rossiya is running three years behind schedule. But it already has a massive lead and years of experience operating in the Arctic.
As in other areas, Russia is tapping China’s investment and technological support, potentially fueling Beijing’s increased interest in the polar regions. It took a Chinese shipyard two years to deliver one recent icebreaker. Though the U.S.’s new icebreaker will be a heavier ice-breaking class than the Chinese vessel, construction started only recently, five years after the contract was awarded to build it.
Cutting through thick Arctic ice
Icebreakers are seen as indispensable for maintaining a presence in the Arctic. Even as global temperatures warm and open up shipping lanes, the region remains largely impenetrable for ships in all but one or two summer months—unless accompanied by a Polar class icebreaker.
Greenland, the world’s largest island, is still treacherous to circumnavigate by ship because of the ice conditions. The island has one of the world’s largest undeveloped zinc deposits in its far north, but the fjord where it is located is icebound almost all of the year.
“We can’t access the region and we can’t have a presence without icebreakers,” said Shannon Jenkins , a senior Arctic policy adviser at the U.S. Coast Guard, which operates U.S. icebreakers.
Icebreakers are classified based on the thickness of the ice they can handle, with Polar-class ships built for the thickest ice. Russia has seven of the heaviest class of Polar icebreakers. The U.S. and its allies have a combined three, with an average age of 46 years, according to consulting firm Arctic Marine Solutions.
Polar icebreakers are shaped in a way that allows them to push their bows up onto the ice and break it with the ship’s weight. The broken ice generally folds under adjacent solid ice, leaving a path of clear water in the ship’s wake.
Icebreakers have reinforced hulls that add weight to the ships, and powerful engines. While conventional ships usually give priority to fuel efficiency over raw power, that math doesn’t work for icebreakers, which need to generate greater force to break through the ice.
The U.S.’s Polar Star, which was commissioned in 1976, is nearly 20 years beyond its designed service life, according to a Congressional Budget Office report last year. The U.S.’s second icebreaker, the Healy, commissioned in 1999, is less powerful, with half the horsepower of the heavy icebreaker.
Canada, which has around 100,000 miles of Arctic coastline, has two Polar-class vessels and two under construction. Over the past decade, they have also built five Arctic and offshore patrol ships—armed vessels that can plow through ice.
European nations including Finland, Sweden, the U.K. and Germany—all members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—have a further 13 icebreakers capable of working in the Arctic, according to some of those countries and the Arctic Institute, a think tank.
The U.S. battle to build an icebreaker
Polar icebreakers are expensive and complex, and the U.S. hasn’t built one since the Polar Star. The U.S. awarded a contract to build a new heavy icebreaker, the Polar Sentinel, in 2019. The first of three new planned ice breakers, it isn’t expected to be finished until after 2030. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the cost for the three ships will reach $5.1 billion, 60% higher than original projections.
The U.S. icebreaker program has fallen so far behind Russia partly because the Arctic faded as a U.S. priority after the Cold War. That began to change around a decade ago, said Rebecca Pincus , director of the Polar Institute at the Wilson Center, a Washington-based think tank.
But momentum on building icebreakers has been hampered by the Coast Guard’s small budgets and lack of political power, said Pincus, who has worked on Arctic policy at the Coast Guard and the Defense Department. The Coast Guard has moved from department to department before most recently becoming a part of Homeland Security.
“Ice breaking was very far away from the Homeland Security focus after 9/11,” she said.
Russia has maintained greater focus on the region in recent decades, in large part because the country’s economy depends on it. The Arctic accounts for over 80% of Russia’s natural-gas production and around 20% of its crude-oil production, according to the International Energy Agency. The world’s largest nickel producer is based in a former Russian Arctic gulag. Russia has been opening the Northern Sea Route , which connects Asia to Europe, to move these raw materials to markets and develop offshore energy fields.
America’s ability to catch up is hampered by a domestic shipbuilding crisis. In the past three years, China has built 47% of all the world’s ships , and the U.S. just 0.1%, according to United Nations data. The lack of commercial shipbuilding means there are few established domestic supply chains for naval vessels, which are routinely built late and over budget in shipyards suffering from recruitment shortages, high costs, a lack of investment and other issues.
Mika Nieminen , the chief executive of Rauma Marine Constructions, a Finnish shipyard that makes icebreakers, said there is a lot of interest in icebreakers but not many shipyards that can make them.
“The capacity will be the question—where are they going to be made,” he said.
Few shipyards have expertise on how ships react in winter conditions and behave on the ice, he said. Many don’t have experience working with the thickness of the steel required for icebreakers, which has to be able to resist fractures in extremely low temperatures.
The company that is building the Coast Guard’s new Polar icebreaker—Bollinger Shipyards, based in Lockport, La.—had to invest $20 million in facilities and infrastructure to make the vessel after taking over construction from another company it had bought. That company—VT Halter Marine, based in Pascagoula, Miss.—had racked up more than a quarter billion dollars in losses on the project without starting construction.
A number of shipyards in the U.S. have closed since 1976, when the Polar Star was built, including the ones that built that icebreaker and the Healy. Many senior shipyard workers from that era have retired.
“If we’re building icebreakers every 30 years, all the know-how goes away,” said Åke Rohlén , who ran the icebreaking divisions of several commercial shippers and is now at Arctic Marine Solutions.
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