By: James Brooks, Alaska Beacon
Last week, President Donald Trump signed a budget bill with almost $25 billion for new Coast Guard construction, including almost $9 billion for new icebreakers and $300 million for new Coast Guard facilities in Juneau.
On Friday, Rear Adm. Bob Little, the new commander of the Coast Guard in Alaska, said it remains to be seen how those new ships will be used and when they will arrive in the Arctic.
“What I hope is, regardless of where in the service that capacity ends up, is that it will overall increase the capacity for the Coast Guard and that the Arctic District can certainly benefit from that increased capacity,” he said.
Until last week, the Coast Guard’s Alaska force was known as District 17. As part of a nationwide renaming project, it’s now the Coast Guard Arctic District. In a ceremony held at Juneau, Little took command of the newly renamed district from Rear Adm. Megan Dean, who has been assigned to Coast Guard headquarters in Washington, D.C.
“It’s a change in name, but our missions, our priorities remain the same,” Little said.
Alaska has the largest commercial fishing fleet in the United States and produces more than half of the nation’s seafood. Key maritime trade routes between Asia and California run through Alaska waters, and cruise ships carry more than 1.5 million passengers through Southeast Alaska each year.
Altogether, the Coast Guard employs almost 2,500 people, including almost 2,000 active-duty Sentinels, as active-duty members are formally known.
Speaking at the ceremony, the head of the Coast Guard in the Pacific Ocean, Vice Adm. Andrew Tiongson, noted that it has been an extraordinarily busy year for the agency, which responded to fishing disasters, medical emergencies, foreign ships near American waters, and the recent sinking of a cargo ship carrying 3,000 cars.
Last year, the Coast Guard responded to 16 cases of foreign ships approaching the international border near Alaska, Tiongson said, calling it “the most significant foreign military presence in our waters near Alaska … in decades.”
Tiongson, who will retire later this month, said he expects the number of foreign ships near Alaska to grow.
Both China and Russia have sailed military ships through international waters near Alaska recently as part of freedom-of-navigation missions to demonstrate their right to travel through international waterways. The United States conducts similar missions near both countries.
Foreign fishing vessels frequently catch fish near the international boundary that marks the economic activity zone between Russia and the United States.
“We have an obligation to be present and to push back, to deter or deny malign activity anywhere that we have sovereign U.S. rights, and in the Arctic District, we have a lot of those and a lot of interest,” Little said.
Right now, the big budget bill isn’t expected to bring immediate help for the Coast Guard in dealing with those issues.
The Coast Guard’s Polar Security Cutter program, which received $4.3 billion under the federal budget bill, isn’t expected to deliver its first new ship until 2030 at the earliest.
When that ship, the Polar Sentinel, arrives in service, it likely will replace the Polar Star, which was commissioned in 1976 and is primarily used to keep open the sea lanes to American research stations in Antarctica.
Additional ships are expected in the following years.
The budget bill also contains $3.5 billion for a new Arctic Security Cutter program, which seeks to launch a lighter icebreaker within three years of a contract being awarded.
That ship, according to published specifications, would only be able to break ice up to 3 feet thick, less than the capability of the Coast Guard’s sole medium icebreaker, the Healy, and equivalent to a Class-5 icebreaker, second-lowest on the six-level international standards rankings.
The bill also contains $816 million to procure additional, unspecified light and medium icebreaking cutters.
That could involve buying and converting commercial ships.
Next month, the Coast Guard is expected to commission the icebreaker Storis in Juneau. That ship was formerly the Arctic oil drilling support ship Aiviq but was purchased by the Coast Guard as an interim icebreaking solution.
Speaking Friday, Little confirmed that the Storis will be operating on a more limited basis until it undergoes a comprehensive refit.
“She’ll be transitioning from kind of an initial operating capability into what we’ll eventually consider full operational capability,” he said. “But that doesn’t diminish the fact that we’ll have a U.S. Coast Guard cutter, painted red with a Coast Guard stripe, operating in the region this summer.”
The budget bill includes $300 million to construct a new port and support facilities in Juneau to support the Storis, but Little said he didn’t have any information Friday on the timeline for construction and development.
For this summer, he said, the plan is to “limit the mission space” for the Storis until its crew and the Coast Guard are familiar with the ship.
“We’ll step into that very thoughtfully,” he said.
Friday’s ceremony didn’t include as much discussion of aviation. The budget bill includes $2.3 billion for up to 40 new MH-60 helicopters, the long-distance workhorses of Coast Guard heliborne aviation.
It also allocates $1.1 billion for six new HC-130J fixed-wing aircraft. In Alaska, five of those aircraft are based at Kodiak and used for extremely long-range search-and-rescue missions, as well as “Arctic domain” flights that can involve flights along the American border in the Arctic Ocean.
The budget bill also contains $2.2 billion for new maintenance facilities nationally, $4.4 billion for shoreside facilities — including the $300 million for Juneau — and $266 million for long-range drone aircraft, an under-developed area for the Coast Guard.
Little said that kind of spending is a “fundamental change” for the Coast Guard, whose annual budget is only about $14 billion.
Coming into his new job, he said he’s aware that as ship traffic increases in the Arctic Ocean and surrounding waters, there are “increased risks, increased commercial traffic, increased tourist traffic, cruise ships, and increased access to what were otherwise hard-to-access waters.”
The risk of a “no-notice incident that we might have to respond to — and it might be a large incident in a more remote area than we’re accustomed to operating, that would be the thing that would maybe keep you up at night.”
