The ICE Pact And New Icebreakers Offers Trump Quick Wins

Over the past decade, few observers realize that President-Elect Donald Trump’s maritime enthusiasms have had lasting strategic value. Take icebreakers. In his first term in office, President Trump regularly celebrated icebreaker-building and called for a big boost to America’s icebreaker fleet. Today, an opportunity to promote icebreakers offers Trump quick wins.

Trump’s early interest in boosting America’s icebreaker fleet—potentially with Finnish help—endured and extended into the Biden Administration. Over the past four years, Trump’s thoughts on boosting America’s icebreaker industrial base grew into a full-fledged international agreement. In November, as a triumphant President-Elect Donald Trump visited the White House, the outgoing Biden Administration quietly finalized a three-country icebreaker-building framework. The subsequent agreement with Canada and Finland, called the “Icebreaker Collaboration Effort (ICE) Pact”, sets Trump up to finally build the icebreakers he wanted.

Trump wants icebreakers within the next four years. In a 2020 “Memorandum on Safeguarding U.S. National Interests in the Arctic and Antarctic Regions,” President Trump was quite clear in calling for a “ready, capable, and available fleet of polar security icebreakers that is operationally tested and fully deployable by Fiscal Year 2029.”

For an incoming president with a flair for Polar strategy, the ICE Pact offers some enormous opportunities. By moving quickly to survey performance on America’s existing icebreaker program and encourage big new shipbuilding investments, Trump staff can, within weeks, chalk up some big cost-cutting and capability-boosting wins. Public confidence from some quick ICE Pact-driven wins will have wider ramifications, bolstering the Trump Administration’s credibility for other, more ambitious ventures.

Icebreakers are not controversial. Both parties fundamentally agree with President Trump’s June 2020 call for fixing the Coast Guard’s icebreaker program and want to build a bigger Polar fleet. The ICE Pact is a good way to do it.

The ICE Pact, described as “a landmark initiative that advances Arctic and polar icebreaker development,” positions the U.S., Finland and Canada to pool both their icebreaker requirements and capabilities, ultimately generating a larger market for the ships. According to a DHS press release generated for the occasion, “the collective investment in our domestic shipyards has the potential to scale production and reduce the cost of Arctic and polar icebreakers for our own use and for our allies and partners.”

The ICE Pact and the sustained and bipartisan interest in building up America’s polar fleet has took Washington DC’s cadre of conventional partisans by surprise. And, today, the basic foundations of the ICE Pact remain valid and are ready for any Party to use.

In the race to get things done, the new administration would be unwise to set aside and kill the ICE Pact. But the temptation is there. An odd corps of swampy Washington DC pugilists are ready to engage, likely supplemented by political pressure from shipbuilding companies. Both Russia and China have a vested interest in halting reform of America’s poor-performing icebreaker-building efforts, and are likely to be wielding their own “influencing campaigns. Regardless of influence, some partisans approach the ICE Pact as little more than a hurried Biden “win” that merits a rapid political death.

That would be a mistake.

The ICE Pact is too good to pass up. Before Trump’s win, ICE Pact critics regularly ignored the wider context, forgetting that Donald Trump had, in his first administration, actively championed the recovery of America’s dwindling operational capabilities at the North and South Poles. With the ICE Pact, America can quickly use some ruthless free market levers to impose cost-cutting discipline on the Coast Guard’s existing icebreaker-building efforts. Even better, the ICE Pact lets America exploit other countries’ icebreaker know-how to “on-shore” polar-oriented naval engineering talent, giving U.S. shipbuilders access to some of the best, low-cost icebreaker designs in the world.

By “on-shoring” Finnish know-how, and supporting a Canadian company’s ongoing effort to set up the West’s center of polar-ready ship production in America, Trump can create healthy industrial competition at home while bolstering America’s future at both ends of the earth. In short, the agreement can help America compete with the world in making icebreakers and other polar-ready craft.

There’s little time to waste. Without a good-sized fleet of at least four to five heavy Polar icebreakers and four to five medium, lighter-duty Arctic icebreakers, America will be able to do little in preventing China and Russia from carrying out a territorial “land grab” in both the Arctic region and on the Antarctic continent. Pushing a fleet of American-flagged icebreakers into the Polar Oceans can level the playing field, protecting key resources from China and Russia.

Icebreakers Offers Trump Quick Wins

The ICE Pact, if properly exploited, grants America access to world-class Finnish icebreaker-building skills. To do that, encouraging Chantier Davie Canada Inc., a Canadian-based shipbuilder, to set up shop in the United States is a good first move.

Getting Davie into the U.S. is an easy win. Davie’s intrepid owners have a solid record of reviving moribund industrial waterfront. Relative newcomers to the industry, they brought a nearly-dead, 200-year-old Canadian shipyard in 2012. By late 2015, the otherwise down-at-the-heels Quebec shipyard was awarded a contract for modification of the MV Asterix, an auxiliary replenishment vessel. The Davie team hit it out of the park. In 2017, the ship was delivered, and by 2018, the vessel was busy replenishing allied vessels across the Pacific.

Turning to Arctic opportunities, Davie decided to invest roughly $500 million into their old Canadian shipyard. In return, Davie is now set to build 90% of Canada’s future medium-heavy to heavy icebreaker fleet.

Davie’s management is a scrappy set of dealmakers, and has wasted no time in hunting down Polar shipbuilding expertise. In 2023, Dave clawed Finland’s biggest icebreaker manufacturer, Helsinki Shipyard, from Russian owners, and is busy bringing that icebreaker-building shipyard back to life. But now that Davie controls a cadre of trained polar-ready naval architects, some solid icebreaker designs, and a stockpile of production know-how—all things that America lacks—the company is quickly leveraging their new Finnish capabilities to support Canada’s domestic heavy icebreaker-building program—driving down cost and adding capabilities.

Like the Trump Administration, Davie is not afraid to take risks. Eying the Trump Administration’s interest in reinvigorating the U.S. fleet, Davie’s leaders appear eager to bring their swashbuckling mindset and newly-acquired capabilities to the United States to see if the company can help bolster America’s maritime industrial base.

Getting Davie to invest in a U.S. shipyard—and commit to re-shoring America’s forgotten icebreaking expertise—would be a big win. A new, competent shipyard will not only reinvigorate some of America’s long-abandoned industrial waterfront, but Davie’s no-nonsense leaders can energize America’s waterfront manufacturing efforts. For shipbuilding, at a minimum, injecting basic competition into future U.S. icebreaker-building proposals will be a real win for the taxpayer. Competition brings down the price of future ships and gives the Coast Guard an opportunity to impose accountability for poor performance or other broken industry promises.

Rather than a quick death, the ICE Pact framework merits a major resource request from Congress to, at a minimum, fund the Coast Guard’s Arctic Security Cutter Program for medium icebreakers.

The ICE Pact framework also offers a means for the Administration to review—or even kill and re-compete—the U.S. Coast Guard’s existing icebreaker shipbuilding effort. The Polar Security Cutter program, aimed at fielding up to three 23,000-ton icebreakers, is woefully behind-schedule and over-budget. The first big cutter, awarded in early 2019, was supposed to arrive in 2024, but the Department of Homeland Security only approved the start of construction of the first big icebreaker in the past month. The program is at real risk, and, with more than $1.7 billion of taxpayer funds already appropriated for the ships, the Congressional Research Service now expects the first big icebreakers to arrive “no earlier than 2029.”

There’s opportunity here. With the troubled Polar Security Cutter program reformed or closed out, the Trump Administration can begin the process of pivoting to proven, lower-cost, tried-and-true Finnish icebreaker designs. The ICE Pact could even potentially lash up with Canada’s heavy icebreaker program, speeding production and reducing the per-unit costs. And, with a cadre of icebreaker-trained naval engineers at Davie’s Helsinki Shipyard already on the job, the ICE Pact can empower those naval engineers and architects to support a crash expansion of America’s desperately undersized talent pool of polar-ready naval architects and naval engineers.

It won’t be easy. Any new entrant in American icebreaker manufacturing will face challenges. The politically adept Louisiana-based Bollinger Shipyards, took over the PSC contract after VT Halter’s parent company, Singapore-based ST Engineering, exited the U.S. shipbuilding business. But Bollinger is apparently struggling to complete the PSC design and to build simple prototype pieces of the PSC.

A new competitive entrant in America’s icebreaker-building community would be a healthy thing. By adding to America’s knowledge-base, the industrial base will improve. And just by being in the U.S., a viable competitor like Davie can force Bollinger Shipyards to move faster or push the shipyard to seek collaborative assistance.

Bollinger, of course, is a smart shipbuilding outfit and it won’t face the threat of competition lightly. But with the cost of the PSC ballooning and a long record of halting progress, the PSC Program, as it is now, has gone from a “cancelation-proof” project to a perfect candidate for Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) scrutiny. The PSC is the Coast Guard’s version of the Navy’s troubled Constellation-class guided missile frigate.

Regardless of the fate of the PSC Program, the Trump Administration is ideally positioned to get the Polar fleet they want by accelerating the entire ICE Pact process. With a temporary waiver of strict build-in-America requirements, the Coast Guard can, essentially, buy Finnish-built medium or heavy icebreakers, obtaining high-end icebreaking capabilities within a matter of years rather than decades.

If an initial Finnish-built vessel production run is coordinated with active “on-shoring” of icebreaker-building capabilities, the Trump Administration can get some much-needed vessels in the water within the next four years, while a new U.S. shipyard is built up and an icebreaker-ready workforce is trained alongside Finland’s cadre of artisans, naval architects and naval engineers.

The ICE Pact helps the Trump Administration justify industry-supportive moves. If the Trump administration, for example, waives costly and time-consuming shipyard construction permitting processes, the entire industry will celebrate. If the ICE Pact provides Canadian shipbuilders the regulatory leeway to set up U.S. shipyards under skilled Canadian managers, America’s polar maritime industrial base can finally break out of the icy PSC logjam it has been trapped in for almost a decade—and other solid foreign shipbuilders will gain confidence that their big U.S. investments won’t be lost at the hands of inexperienced U.S. shipyard managers.

The ICE Pact is a perfect tool to force forward reforms in the International Traffic in Arms Limitations, align mutual security classification understandings with Europe, and break through other pesky bureaucracy that keeps successful shipbuilding designs, talent and production practices outside America’s borders.

ICE Pact insiders describe the ICE Pact as “an example of how industrial policy, when implemented alongside allies and partners, can be enormously effective in advancing national security.” That’s all nice, but, put bluntly, the ICE Pact offers the Trump Administration an easy, early route to some major successes. It’s a great tool, ready and waiting, to make American shipbuilding great again.

Writing that “the memorandum of understanding sets out a framework for how we can cooperate with Finland and Canada to ensure the benefits of this effort rebound to all involved,” ICE Pact insiders hope the incoming Trump team will keep the ICE Pact and fully exploit it.

This is no easy task. Progress with the ICE Pact and icebreakers will take a tough Administration and some savvy staffers to shove aside some big barriers. Politically-connected shipyards will do almost anything to keep their profitable contracts safe. Russia and China, busy manipulating the American public, want America out of the Polar regions. And within the U.S. government, Coast Guard bureaucrats are loathe to risk losing costs already sunk into the PSC Program. Such changes are hard but they are overdue.

If the ICE Pact tools are put to immediate use, Trump can quickly get some big wins. By leveraging America’s experience with the multinational AUKUS defense accords, the Trump Administration can employ the ICE Pact framework—a polar AUKUS—to get new American icebreakers into the field within the next four years. In short, the ICE Pact is fast route to new icebreakers, and the promise of new icebreakers offers Trump quick wins.