Episode 708: The Icebreaker Imperative, with Peter Rybski

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waiting for you. When you do have time for us and today's show, let's just go ahead and dive into it. As things just starting to get chilly, there's not a better topic out there then, I think the ice around us, and when you look at the US territory. One of the most militarily and energy strategic spaces we have is up in Alaska. We are in our tech nation, and we have extensive economic interests with our allies as well, Canada, Denmark,

Norway up in the Arctic region. But when you look at in twenty twenty four, what ship that we have icebreakers and not just up there, we have Antarctica requirements as well. It's old, it's broken, and decisions were made years ago that we needed to get back into the icebreaker game.

Pete is a retired nuclear trained service warfare officer whose last job on ACTI duty was the US Naval attache to Finland, and he loved Finland so much he decided that he was going to stay right there and say hi to the Russians from a little over one hundred miles away, Pete, Welcome.

digging into it. But just as a backgrounder, I'm curious what takes a nice American nuclear trained swow and decides, you know what, I want to retire and plant my flag.

And it was Thanksgiving a week and I was just PCSD and my phone rang one of those Sunday phone calls that said, we need to talk about where you think you're going next, Like, well, I've already left. Well, what had happened is over on the Theodore Roosevelt, which was in refueling overall at the time. Their assistant reactor

officer had felt some severe back problems. To make a long story short, my short tour became three years on the Theodore Roosevelt, from taking out of overhaul to a deployment. The fortunate thing was the same. I had the same detailer when that happened as when I left Theodore Roosevelt three years later. So part of the deal, he looked at me and said, well, where do you want to go. I'll help you get there. And I've always wanted the Navy to teach me a foreign language, so I volunteered

for the at HAS Shape program. I got released, went to interview and compete, and there were two spots open at the time, at least two spots where the family didn't have to take malariy pills. One was Athens, Greece, and one was Helsinki, Finland. At the time, Athens was pretty much on fire. People were bernie tires in the streets. You couldn't get cash out of the ATM. So the wife and I talked about it and decided we'd try

out the Nordics for a bit. I'd already been in the area with a short tour that I did in London when I was a young lieutenant at the former Naval Forces Year of Headquarters, the Year of Language, six months of at that say school, and packed the bags for Finland. I was in the atche job for about three and a half years. It was three years and I extended because of COVID they couldn't move folks back and forth so easily, so it took an extra year,

and then retired in twenty twenty one. In the interim, my wife picked up employment here in Helsinki. She works for the European Center of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, where they do a lot of counter Russian disinformation in the Balkans and in the Eastern Europe. And she's the US rep there working right now as a DoD contractor. So she has a great job.

I got here in June of twenty seventeen. The first visit we had was the comment to the Coastguard who came here in November of twenty seventeen. Right around the same time the Second of Defense made a visit. So as a young at Shay, I handled the Coast Guard visit on my own, which is fine and one of the things that the Finns did, and as they've been doing for years, is well to back up a second cooperation between Finland and the US and ice breakers goes

all the way back. A friend of mine here has been researching it and found stuff from the Ford administration which talks about it. But he we some of the other ice breakers in our inventory are based on Finish design. There's intellectual property changes and all this sort of things.

So with Coastguard icebreakers in the news and the command of the Coast Guard here, the first thing we did was tour basically one of Finland's ice breakers who went to the company that operates their ice breakers, toured the polarists toward another one of the ice breakers went to the design company, saw their ice test tank, talked to some of the naval architects went to where they manufactured the azipods down the east side of of Helsinki, or they assembled them all.

this interest, and well, I should learn about this. And because of the persistent interest in icebreakers by the Coast Guard by congressional delegations during the Trump administration, this just built up from there. So it started quite with that one visit, and then every time we'd bring a Coast Guard officer here, which was quite frequent early on because Finlan was chair of the Coast Guard Arctic Forum at the time, we'd go ahead and do something icebreaker related.

So I've I think I've had many many coast Guard business during my time in the Cetus and Naval Atsche, and we'd bring the navy folks out as well to see some of the technology involved in modern ice breaking. So that's what really sparked the interest, because I find them fascinating and just learning how they operate, Learning how the more modern machines operate and how the development happened from these sort of older idea to the more modern ships has been a fascinating stuff for me.

language tucked away five and a half million souls. Yet from a couple of the articles that I've dug up, eighty percent of the ice breakers in the world were designed in Finland, and they actually build sixty percent of them, so you would think that it is. The Coastguard took over the ice breakers from the Navy back in nineteen sixty six, so nothing new for him. So as you know, we as a nation, we're deciding that, you know, we need to go go ahead and build our ice breakers

and go out and start bidding it. That process started. I think in like twenty ten that Finland would be one of our at that time friendly nations. Now as a NATO ally we would really lean on. But it hasn't quite turned out that way in twenty twenty four with what we're trying to do with ice breakers, which is unfortunate. And talk for a little bit for the listeners that might not be aware that it's not an accident. Why Finland really knows icebreakers? Knows icebreakers?

coast of Finland. And what happens is that the Baltic's a little less salty than the Atlantic Ocean, so the ice form is a little bit quicker, and then you have a persistent wind that blows west to eat so it's not only the ice forming, but the ice that hits the land and stacks and stacks and stacks has forms, large ridges and large bits of ice that are quite

quite difficult to penetrate. So with an environment like this, if you want to import and export goods twelve months out of the year, you need a way to keep the ports open. And it's really only been since the nineteen seventies that that's been a national thing where they're able to actually keep the designated ports open for import

and export during the winter. So what you have is these rather difficult ice breaking conditions, even by some of the polar standards, just with the way the ice blows around and the pressure on the ice and how it stacks up. So you need that if you want to eat fresh fruits and vegetables during the winter, if you want to export goods, particularly lumber and other goods from the North back to the other parts of Europe because

the rail connections don't work these days. I mean, I didn't know what I got here, but the rail here is all Soviet gauge and there's only one narrow connection to Sweden, so most stuff has to come by sea. So in order to keep those ports open, this is what the Fins are specialized in. I mean they built their own ice breakers. They build ice breakers for commercial use, and back when we are more friendly with Russia, if they built a lot of icebreakers for Russia and before

Russia the Soviet Union. So they've taken what they've learned in the iterative designs of ice breakers to keep their own ports open, applied it to ice breaking in general and have developed quite the ability to build all kinds of ice breakers, and not just sort of Baltic c es coort ice breakers, but Arctic research vessels and the whole like. It's one of the things that the Fins

focus on. It is a government support and industry. I think in order to keep for a takeover of some of the assets, the government has stepped into some of the companies and taken an ownership stake, just recognizing that it is of national interest. But basically up here everything does freeze, and if you don't have the ships, you can't keep the trade flowing.

paper of all the analysis. But what really sparkled about ten years ago was was with the Polar Region to be the Arctics become more accessible during the summer, so you have an increase in traffic, you have an increase in ocean traffic, cruise traffic, and a lot of goods and services are starting to flow in the high latitudes. And because of that, the Coastguard needs to do traditional coast guard functions. And this really is coming in about

the past ten years. It's unbelievable. But in two thousand and six they actually essentially gave funding for the ice breaker program to the National Science Foundation to support science missions, and they had to negotiate with the Coast Guard how many days each year and it would become a funding difficulty.

So there wasn't this sort of although some people saw it coming, it wasn't really a priority and didn't get the funding. And now when you look at these mission sets that the Coastguard has been ignoring for the past twenty twenty years, and some of the ideas of how they would use ice breakers to just patrol our own territorial waters, our own exclusive economic zone, patrol our extended continental shelf in the north slope of Alaska when you

have significant Russian traffic going back and forth. Now there's suddenly an interest saying, well, wait a minute, we need to have ships capable of operating up there, are ships capable of ensuring that the Navy can operate up there, just because you know, that's where the Russians are, that's where the Chinese are, and they can operate rather freely up there because of the number and capability of their ice breakers and their ice capable vessels. So we need

to have a presence there as well. Otherwise, you know, if you can't patrol it, if you can't control it, and it should things go poorly that you can't contest it.

I know this has been an issue for the people trying to build the Constellation class frigates and others, and that has to do with having the artisans and work which if you do quality welding, that is an art you know, welders, ship fitters, you know, everybody that goes into building a ship just having trouble finding the people to do it. And the one thing that has always bothered me in the series of excuses has been the

one we haven't built one in fifty years. When you look at you know, the People's Republic of China, which is not an artic nation, though they're making themselves one. They and I'm going to quote a little bit from an article over g Captain that went out this August quote Chinese shipyards have constructed ice breaking research vessels at an impressive rate, albeit smaller in size than the much

delayed US Polar Security cutter. The construction of the Jedi and Tensu Hung how are you prodounceing that took only around two years from first steel cutting to completion. The much larger jue Long To, China's first domestically built polar ice breaker, was completed in twenty nineteen, in under three years. There's a lot to this story than just the fact that we don't produce enough welders or that we don't

know how to pick up the phone. Is that there's an undercurrent here and a lot of echoes that whatever different inputs came into how the US Navy and the US Coast Guard builds, procures, and manages a program ship, it's simply not working. When other nations who it hasn't been fifty years, they've never done it, they have the

ability to turn to and make it happen. Both nations that only have five point five million people compared to our three hundred and thirty five are nations that have over a billion more people than we do in population. There's a larger issue at stake here than just a couple of program managers having trouble working with a shipyard build.

Than an ocher Arctic. They had a couple of guys in China who oversaw production to make sure that their brand quality was maintained and construction of the vessel. So the Chinese basically did it right. They went to the people who know how to build ice breakers and they said, we want you to design one that we can build, and Oker did, and then they overseed construction and there it came out some of the smaller vessels. I think

most of the Chinese vessels these days. There's only two of their recent vessels that had been designed in house. And although they were designed in house. They're actually ice tested here in Finland in the ice tanks. So basically they went to the experts and they didn't let themselves get in the way so much. From an outside perspective, it seems to be that their own designs that they're building right now are not quite as capable as the one that they that they purchased and got from Finland.

But they are making steps and producing them and there's nothing magic about making an ice breaker. One of NATO's most capable icebreaker is a French cruise ship right now. That cruise ship, the La Commandant Scharco, is a polar class two ice breaker. It's the best thing NATO has and it was built in a Romanian shipyard. The Romanians, what do they know about building ice breakers? Well, the company that does the design work and varred at the shipyard, Bonner.

It came together and made sure that the design not other requirements and that it could actually be built. And I think we missed that US Coast Guard. It seems to me to use a Navy comparison that, but I think is probably still true. But ice breaking in the coast Guard is like my warfare in the United States Navy is this backwater of people who are doing a great mission of working really hard, but the broader Coast Guard could care less until they really need it, until

things really keyed up there. One of the frustrating things about watching this congressional testimony over and over again is how you hear the same things and if you were to ask the same question in five consecutive hearings, can you give example of a successful commercial icebreaker program? I don't think anyone can answer it. Why the information's out there,

it's not hard to find. You can look at these things and see them, but it just doesn't seem although it stated as our top priority or a top priority, it just doesn't really seem to be. I don't quite understand this. I've seen a lot of resistance since twenty seventeen when I would see some of the senior Coast Guard officials who had travel to Finland and they make comments like, oh, can you believe the Finns are trying to push their medium Baltic sea ice breakers on us.

They can't build anything that we need, Like, well, you're wrong. The Finns built one of the Russians nuclear ice breakers here at Helsinki's shipyard. Of course, the reactor plants were added separately later on, but these things can be done here and again, like three days ago, I was talking to someone back in DC who said that another, perhaps different, unnamed senior official had stated the same thing. I can't believe we're talking about Finland again. They can't do anything that we need.

back with the design study. And then from there they narrowed it down and the three finalists, at least two of them involved a company that had experienced with ice breaking. The three finalists were as VT Halter, then it was Philly Shipyard partnership with ocher Arctic and Vard and it was a Bullinger and they are partnered with a Danish company.

twenty six. That was proposed almost ten years ago, but the Coast Guard kept saying, no, thank you, we don't want it, we don't need it, until about two years ago when it was, oh, thank you, Congress, please give us the money we need to buy this ship. So there are some things and solutions that are out there. It just seemed like the Coastguard wanted to bet all on this one billion dollar initial cost icebreaker that was

going to do everything. I guess they figured we're only going to get a couple, we might as well make them awesome, and that that perfect became the enemy of the good enough and of the icebreakers available right now.

And this is the problem of the constellation A lot of other the ships that we build or attempt to build in the US is that somebody comes in the LCS class example, somebody comes in with a design and then and then all the the other people get it start adding things to it. Pretty soon you've got you know, an elephant instead of the horse you meant to design. So how much do you see that as as an

impact on why we can't get this done quickly? Is it the requirements have changed and they change a midstream The Coast Guard really isn't that interested? What is the what is what are the big holdbacks on this?

based on a parent design. Now, most naval architects I talked to think the idea of a parent design it has its place, but in general it's not worth it because for that time, especially in something like an icebreaker. I mean here in Finland, with decades of data on hull forms, hull shape sizes, propulsion needs, they can custom design use something based on proven concepts rather quickly. But the Coast Guards selected a design for a ship that

still hasn't been built. It's a German research icebreaker. Called the polar Stern two, which exists in a design at some level.

so they had to start from scratch. There is some change involved that created an iterative iterative changes which changed the size of the ship, the propulsion requirements, the endurance requirements, everything else, and it almost went back to square one design. And the ship guard blames COVID and all these things, but that's me. There are other shipyards in the world

who do this very well. I mentioned this cruise ship Lacammandade Charcot that was five and a half years from you know, a white paper design to the north Pole. He built very quickly, even though it's it's state of the art and it has a lot of things that hadn't been done before. So I'm not certain what the problem or the backup is with Bolinger and or vt

Altar before. In Bolinger now, I wish there was more transparency on it as a taxpayer, especially because the Congressional Budget Office basically says that this thing is going to cost not one billion for the first one, but probably about two billion, and then if you buy all three instead of costing two point seven, we're going to be spending over five billion.

Well that frees you up to buy two national security cutters in the aggregate if you do a couple of these to buy a couple other cutters. Now you have a mission package if you have an escort capable icebreaker and you have a national security cutter. So if you want to operate off of Alaska, you put them in tandem.

again we control because we designed it. There are other nations with fewer assets to draw on that are able to produce more, better, faster than we do. So it's an internal problem that we have to solve.

our icebreakers ready to go. It was it twenty seven or twenty nine, and it's not even a mature design yet, even though they've already cut steel on it.

Fins are building four ice capable corvettes right now. They're multi mission ships. They're looking into ages for them at first, but they had to decline it just because of the cost. Because the total cost for four they're really frigates but they call them corvettes is going to be about one point two billion. For four it's a three hundred milliship.

And then they're not icebreakers per se, but they're enough to go anywhere in the Baltic Sea they need to go regardless of the ice conditions, so they're going to be quite capable and coming in at that cost. The cruise ship I mentioned, which I pulled into Helsinki a couple of weeks ago and I had the chance to go a toy. I mean it is really an icebreaker.

know how to do it, and buy them. Except for the fact we have this requirement that we can't buy ships made in foreign countries, and so we're limited to importing the expertise buying some of the components, but no more than forty nine percent, I think, and I can't remember exact terms, but you know, talk a little bit about the impact of the Jones Act and some of these other laws have prohibit us from just simply purchasing some of these ships.

will on this point. This is what we started to see in back in twenty twenty at the end of the first Trumpet administration where he had President Trump had a great relationship with then finished President Sally Ninist and

they would always talk about icebreakers. Ice breakers were a constant theme between the two of them, and there were several large visits on this subject and a lot of things started moving in a certain direction because the Trumpet administration was willing to issue a Title fourteen waiver, I believe, and they are working on a medium term solution because back at that point in time, the polar security cutter

was still relatively new. It wasn't you know, the problems that have come to light now hadn't come to light at that point. But that was still going to be that. The long term solution was to build three or or more of these vessels. But in the interim there was a need for vessels now like there still is four years later. And to fulfill that there are two things

specifically looked at. When was the least or purchase of an existing ice breaker and that's when our friend the Ivich down there, since it was US built, came to mind. And then there are two finish multi purpose ice breakers which are available for lease or perhaps purchase more light like lease I believe, depends on the politics here at the time, that can do polar missions. So that was

sort of a short term solution. Medium term solution was going to build a commercial spec icebreaker in Finland or several of them in three or four years. You had to shipyard loading at the time here in Finland that was feasible if done quickly. So we had there was a short term, a medium term, and a long term. Part of that midterm wasn't just going to be We're

just going to open purchase three ice breakers. There was an idea of a partnership where you'd have a U S shipyard come over here, work with the fins of the finished shipyard and partnership on design and building.

the long term solution. Because the Coast Guard ultimately says it needs eight or nine vessels, and that's pretty consistent with its mission analysis over the years. It sometimes drops to four or five when it gets rid of the DoD aspect of that, and by that I mean the naval operational concepts for a while.

on building three. So if all goes well, we'll sit here at twenty forty with three ice breakers and say we need eight or nine. So what gets me on this is the lack of a long term plan. You can criticize the Navy's thirty year shipbuilding plan, but you could look at the Navy's thirty year shipbuilding plan. You can't look at the Coast guards thirty year shipbuilding plan because it doesn't exist, at least publicly.

capable corvette. And you can look back even to the US Navy's history. We had the Wind class ice breakers that were built from forty two to two, which for their time were armed like a destroyer destroyer escort type ships of the same era. But we have that report from twenty ten that said we needed six which is three of which needed to be heavy. We're working on the heavy part and you outline you depend upon how you define your terms. We need an additional three doesn't

have to be heavy, but more ships. Is if the Russians have over forty ice breakers, seven of which are nuclear.

And we know how important Alaska is, we know the China's going up there more and the fact that relations aren't getting friendlier with either China or the People's Republic of China, is there any appetite or at least acknowledge it of the fact that whether we build three or nine icebreakers, at some point that they need to be prepared to defend themselves in the Arctic, because all of our potential enemies, in some of our allies, seem to have done the analysis of the situation such that they

are going into Arctic armed while we're not.

But those are those are patrol. Those are harder patrol ships. They're not true ice breakers. They're not going to go up into the hard ice and they're not really going to be able to bring anyone with them. Up into into hard ice, or into any ice for that matter.

It's just not the way it is. There is a recent exercise and name of it escapes me, but they're doing a search and rescue exercise with a cruise ship up off of Greenland, and they used the Commandante Charcot, this French cruise ship, and that actually broke the ice for the patrol vessels to come on in and do the rescue operations at one point because the vessels couldn't penetrate the ice back around Greenland. So there's when we

talk about ice breakers. I think this is a good point for me to bring this up, that not all ice breakers are created equal. I mean, saying icebreaker is like saying warship, and that covers your small harbor patrol boat and your aircraft carrier with the same turn. So when you look at ice breakers, you got to look at really two things. One is the function and the

other is the classification function. I feel a good example of this is I mentioned these patrol ice breakers, which are designed to sort of take themselves up and control areas in shore. National sovereignties maintained maybe enforce the law, provides some search and rescue and then you have research ice breakers which are similar, but they took the le

go to the polar regions. So you're going to send a ship up to the Arctic or down to the Antarctic, and they are going to conduct scientific research solely on that vessel. The Heale falls into this category are medium ice Breaker, which was commissioned or built in nineteen ninety nine, and actually Healey is based on a Finnish icebreaker design. The Icebreaker also and there was intellectual property exchange in her construction with Finland. There were fins on the ground

at Avondale Industries when they are building the ship. Cooperation going on during that process. But these ships are designed for independent operations. They're not designed to assist other vessels in the ice and can they perhaps, but it's not pretty.

I was trying to think of a way to illustrate this when someone reminded me of what happened to Noam Alaska back and I think it was twenty twelve when they missed a fuel large delivery before the winter ice came in, so they were there out they needed to get some more petroleum products shipped in there, but the whole area was iced up and Heally was the only available vessel to escort in a tanker, so we got this Russian tanker. They did a Jonzact waiver because it

went from the Illusions up into Nome. And Healey escorted this tanker for about three hundred miles according to some of the reports that I've read from the ice pilot, they made some days only five or six miles. And part of the problem, I mean Heally could handle that ice level at a relatively good speed, and the tanker she was escorting did have an ice hardened double hole,

so she was going to survive. But ice, it's like water, right, I mean, it is water, but when you have wind over ice, it creates pressure, just like wind over water creates your waves. It has a definite effect. So when you have strong wind blowing, the ice is under a lot of pressure. So if you're breaking the ice, even if you're just a little bit, you know, one hundred yards in front of the ship behind you, the ice

go reform right behind you. So as you break the ice, you know, you try to break a channel for another vessel. So what he Y saws, she'd break ice, cut a swath and freeze up right behind her. Now he use an older model ice breaker, so she's not quite as maneuverable as the modern potted ships. So it was a lot of work for her to turn around and keep breaking the ice to keep this vessel moving. It was it was a grind for three hundred miles to bring

this ship in. Meanwhile, here in Finland, that's what the ice breakers do day in and day out. They do that close aboard work. They're very very maneuverable. A lot of the ships, they're not just opening a channel, they're bringing the vessel in. They have a toe notch. They have a great towing capability, so they'll they'll let that big merchant vessel go right up into their stern notch, tie them off and pull them in through the ice as a single vessel to eliminate that sort of surging problem.

And just what they do day in and day out, and they're very good at it. So you can take an esport ice breaker and you can do another mission. You can send the ship to show the flag wherever you want to go, but you can't necessarily take a control ice breaker and do one of these other missions. I seem to have lost roles going with this in answering your question. But this is one of those differences that's out there when it comes to the Russian ice breakers.

The Russians have a major sea route north to seventy degrees.

year round, including during the winter. So having ten nuclear ice breakers at the hard points will enable a lot of their liquid natural gas shipments to get out directly to China and to the east from the Yamal Peninsula and other locations, and they're seeing quite the increase in traffic there. So the Russians have ice breakers to keep that route open to support their oil and gas industry. So that's the broader reason for all their ships, and

very few of them are armed. I know the Project two three, five five zero gets a lot of attention, but it's a talk of the any ship cruise missiles. This is a modular system for the caliber. It's these containerized missiles that it's supposed to have space for and power for. But I don't think we've actually seen these modular caliber missiles deployed anywhere at all despite them being

being listed as available. So I'm not so concerned. I think at this point it's just a ship that's well armed with guns, which the Norwegians have, and the Canadians are building their offshore patrol vessels, offhore patrol ships which have small arms as well. You're not really talking about

arming icebreakers yet. I don't think there really is any movement for that, for sort of these polar missions, rather for these sort of local patrol missions that involve extending sovereignty and off Greenland small Barred, the northern parts of the Bay of Botanya, the eastern parts of the Baltic Sea. These are where you're seeing a lot of the ice hardened vessels be built.

there's no concrete projects involved. I mean, the idea as I heard some one of the National Security Council officials say, was something about if we can all get better together, we can drive the cost down, then we expect a large increase in orders of ice breakers and ice capable vessels up to ninety over the next decade or whatever. But I honestly, I don't know what he's talking about.

in existence that are already planned. As far as reducing the costs, I mentioned some of the comparative costs earlier building in Europe or building at Finland versus building in the United States. Are building in Canada, the costs here significantly lower. And right now Helsinki ship Yard, which was just purchased by Davy of Canada has an open order book. I mean they have no orders right now, so the market it doesn't exist for that many ice breakers.

bid for construction. It was supposed to be too, but always decreased to one because of a cost basically available revenue from from Sweden to buy a vessel right now, and there are some political and sort of legal wrangling going on over the finished contracts right now, so those are both still open, but they'll be coming up. The next two years. Canada's has a national ship building plan. They've laid out who's going to build their ships and

when they're going to be built. If you look at the ones and twos of the Arctic research vessels or the Antarctic research vessels that will be replaced, the demand doesn't seem to be anywhere near ninety. I know, those ships, like I'd say about eighty five percent of them, you could already tell where they're going to be built just

based on the client, based on the customer. So the ice pack that it stands now, I mean, the Fins are excited about it because they think that if the US is serious about acquiring icebreakers, eventually they'll come to the only solution available, which is to buy an icebreaker built in Finland. So even though it's explicitly not part of the ice packed, the Fins are quite open about that. You can read about it here in the newspapers, and if you talk to people at all, they'll tell you directly.

And that's our goal here. But even if we don't get it, if you want the best diesel engines for cold weather, if you want the best pod oft propulsion, if you want you know, the best components. You're going to have to buy them from US anyway. But if you really want the ships in the timeline that you say you need them, and you really want them, you don't have any other alternatives.

can't produce it. Here's like, well, you know, the Japanese buy a lot of a US military kit, why don't we You know, if you want to want a friend, be a friend, won't return the favor, and you know, just just buy some US twos from them.

between Filling and the US. So throwing a billion dollars this way to not throwing, but building. You can even build a heavy ice breaker here. I mean, you can build one that does what we want the polar security to cutter to do. You can build one of those vessels here in a much shorter period of time. It's just the fact that it is. I like to compare. I've mentioned this cruise ship several times because it started

about the same time. I mean, they started in twenty sixteen with the planning, looking at all the ice conditions they want to take the ship into. They went into concept design, detailed design, and by you know, I think it was the middle of twenty twenty one, the thing was at the North Pole, and this past summer it went to something called the North Pole of Inaccessibility, which is the farthest point from land in the Arctic Ocean,

and there's nothing up there. It's the only ship that's gone there by itself, I think, besides the Russian iceed, the Russian nuclear ice breaker fifty years of victory, may have gone up that way doing arrest you a couple of years ago. But ships usually go in tandem because if you break down up there, I mean, you're screwed

here a long way from help. So that I think goes into the confidence and the reliable and the redundancy built into a modern commercial spec icebreaker that costs quarter of what we intend to spend to build a vessel that might not even be as capable. So I think

there's a lot of good that can come. And like I mentioned earlier, in the last go round in the Trump administration, there was a lot of we gathered a lot of good information in fact, the reason I started by substack was because a lot of the information I gathered and reported in channels I don't think made it anywhere, and I thought that should this come back around, I'd like to hang a lot of this information, this publicly available information, in a single location, so that people who

may have questions and want to find an answer can do so quite easily. So I think there's a lot of possibility for good. It's going to take some political capital to do it, and if we can get this right, realize that shipbuilding and strategy is not a US alone piece.

So they are really pushing for more in Antarctica and right now, I mean fifty percent of our icebreaker fleet, which is the Polar Star, that exists right now solely to ensure that our Antarctic research stations get resupplied every

year as part of Operation Deep Freeze. There's a period where both the Polar Star and its sister shifted the Polar Sea, which has been broken since twenty ten, and it's just a spare parts bin that's slowly emptying for the Polar Star, where we didn't have any ships and we had to lease or basically charter a vessel, So we chartered the Odin from Sweden for a bit, but that was the same winter that was really tough up here and a lot of goods got trapped in the ice.

So now Odin is no longer allowed to leave Swedish territorial waters or Swedish waters during the northern hemisphere of winter, so she's out. And the other vessel we charted it was a Russian ice breaker which is now scrapped. So there are no other options for us to get our gear, mainly our fuel down to mcfernis station, from there to the North Pole Station, then right now the Polar Star.

Although I sometimes showed that we should invite the French cruise Shift to make a port of Colin McMurdo, you know, once a year, and I could handle that for us without having to send one of our fifty percent of

our operative icebreaking fleet down that way. But yes, Antarctica is important, and yeah, presence there would be a good thing, and there are a couple of icebreakers up here we wish can do that you can get a new build icebreaker that can do that in a couple of years, because that is probably the hardest mission that the US Coast Guard icebreakers have to do.

finish you the ice packed. I was hoping to write more once the actual memorandum of understanding was made public, but that has been made public yet, and I'll be continuing to follow the Poor Security cutter program closely. We're supposed to know the updated cost and timeline by the end of this year. I'm guessing that will be leaked on New Year's Eve, perhaps if it even happens.