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

241 points by chmaynard 2y ago

darth_avocado 2y ago
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.
- fredgrott 2y ago
  they already do see https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/politics/2024/07/10/us-partners-with-canada--finland-to-build-arctic-icebreaker-ships https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/politics/2024/0...
- jahewson 2y ago
  Technological knowhow is one thing, but the real problem is that we can’t build any kind of ship anymore, neither commercial nor naval: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41456073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41456073
  - supportengineer 2y ago
    What about nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers built in Newport News, VA ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newport_News_Shipbuilding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newport_News_Shipbuilding
- rjsw 2y ago
  That is what is being done with the next class of US Navy frigates [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation-class_frigate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation-class_frigate
  - pixelesque 2y ago
    Which itself is turning into a bit of a disaster in terms of how different they are to the original Italian design...
    - seb1204 2y ago
      Yeah, I like to buy that ship again and while you are at it I want you to use imperial bolts, doors opening to the right and extra tall showers. A copy job is never just a copy job.
0xffff2 2y ago
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?
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
  > 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? It sounds like it is the former. > If and when the ships are completed (currently 2029 for the first vessel at the earliest), they are expected to cost $1.7-1.9 billion apiece[0], roughly four to five times what a comparable ship would cost to build[1] elsewhere. 0: https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2024-08/60170-Polar-Security-Cutter.pdf https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2024-08/60170-Polar-Securit... 1: https://sixtydegreesnorth.substack.com/p/the-silicon-valley-of-icebreaking https://sixtydegreesnorth.substack.com/p/the-silicon-valley-...
- jahewson 2y ago
  > Is it that the US ship builders aren't competent Yes, they are woefully uncompetitive. They produce single-digit numbers of commercial oceangoing ships annually, at 2-4x the cost of elsewhere. It’s an industry on life support.
  - delfinom 2y ago
    The same industry is currently crying they can't people to work the shipbuilding jobs. Heh
  - beloch 2y ago
    Canada has the same problem with building icebreakers. The problem with icebreakers capable of dealing with multi-year ice is that they're a very expensive and specialized kind of ship that's hard to construct, but also the sort of ship that has a very long lifetime. Only a few governments in the world have any need of such ships, and they typically only need a few in the span of many decades. By the time Canada got around to looking for new icebreakers, not a single shipyard in the country had made one in many decades. Ordering a ship from someplace foreign that had actually made one recently would be cheaper than trying to make one domestically. However, then shipyards that haven't made an icebreaker for twenty years would become shipyards that haven't made one for forty years. It really would make a lot of sense for close allies like Canada and the U.S. to collaborate on building icebreakers.
wongarsu 2y ago
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.
- thijson 2y ago
  Seems so, TSMC had issues with keeping costs under control while building their fab in Arizona. The military is having trouble building submarines and ships at the same rate as China is capable of. Nuclear plants are being built way over cost. I'm reminded of this article which explains why elevators cost so much more here in the USA than the rest of the world: https://archive.is/u7Bp9 https://archive.is/u7Bp9
  - davemp 2y ago
    > And plumbing codes in America require an entire network of ventilation piping that has been deemed largely unnecessary in much of the world. There’s a lot of surprising info in that article. This one section that I actually have passing knowledge of is just blatantly false. The majority of US states use and heavily contribute to the international plumbing code which allows for single stack ventilation as described in their linked article. My house from 1958 has single stack ventilation… Sections like that with easily verifiable falsehoods bring the rest of the facts presented by the article into question for me.
- kinjba11 2y ago
  This seems to be endemic to civilization period. Nobody pays attention until the last one breaks, and by then nobody knows how it's done anymore. I'm reminded of the fleet of ships that repairs undersea data cables, which are looking at aging staffing issues. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40075402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40075402 https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea-deep-repair-ships https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea...
xixixao 2y ago
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.
quasse 2y ago
> 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-shipbuilding-capacity-is-232-times-greater-than-that-of-the-united-states/ 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.
- ben7799 2y ago
  Interesting. I would conjecture that we have the same cultural issues at this point preventing us from building effective passenger rail systems.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    Passenger rail systems require the procurement of immense amounts of very pricey land, or the transfer of ownership of existing rail lines. I don’t see that as a similar cultural issue. Boat building can be solved by spending money to build boats (and perhaps waiting a couple decades for expertise to be built up). Using eminent domain or changing the view of the public on land rights is a much higher barrier.
    - gottorf 2y ago
      > Boat building can be solved by spending money to build boats (and perhaps waiting a couple decades for expertise to be built up). I actually don't take it for granted that enough money thrown at a problem can automatically solve it. There's a critical mass of underlying assumptions without which the marginal output of each additional dollar supplied becomes so limited that it just doesn't make sense, even with the government money printer.
epistasis 2y ago
> 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.
- mmooss 2y ago
  [dead]
- pitaj 2y ago
  I'm sure the Jones Act still plays a part, leading our domestic shipbuilding capabilities (including military and icebreakers) to atrophy in competitiveness.
mmooss 2y ago
> ... 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.
- cyberax 2y ago
  > How about we let Finland build the icebreakers We can't. Jones Act.
  - roywiggins 2y ago
    "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. It’s possible to waive this requirement via presidential authorization[0], but there hasn’t appeared to be much interest in this." [0] https://sixtydegreesnorth.substack.com/p/yes-the-us-coast-guard-can-build https://sixtydegreesnorth.substack.com/p/yes-the-us-coast-gu... "In practice Congress would need to support such a plan by appropriating funds for the project."
  - mmooss 2y ago
    We can change the law. It happens every day.
    - roywiggins 2y ago
      Especially since Congress needed to allocate funds for the project anyway, just pass a law that says "buy some ice breakers from Finland, notwithstanding any other laws, and here's 1 billion dollars to do it."
    - xyzzyz 2y ago
      Yes, but repeals of very actively enforced law that's over 100 years old do not happen every day.
ggm 2y ago
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.
- aidenn0 2y ago
  See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41456073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41456073
baggy_trough 2y ago
We have simply accreted too many regulations and special interest groups like barnacles.
vasco 2y ago
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?
- AftHurrahWinch 2y ago
  It's not a stupid question, but ice is remarkably durable and has 'self healing properties', to describe ice-cubes sticking together in the most pretentious way possible. There have been projects to make battleships out of ice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk Bonus answer: melting it with a flamethrower would be incredibly expensive because of enthalpy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- polairscience 2y ago
  I'll answer this as someone who has spent some decent chunk of time on icebreakers. It's hard to really picture what travel through sea ice is like if you haven't done it. Breaking ice isn't that hard... at least if you only have to do it once. But breaking ice for hundreds or thousands of miles is really really hard. Articles like this one tend to gloss over just how specialized every single icebreaker is. And when they build new ones they often try new things to make it easier. My favorite thing I've seen is a set of compressor nozzles that attempt to make it easier for the ship to glide through the ice. FYI, people hear icebreaker and they imagine that the ship literally cracks the ice like a wedge. It's very much less graceful. Icebreakers work like a beached whale where they propel themselves onto the ice and smash it under their weight. When they get stuck many of the ships have the ability to roll to try to break it further. All that said, a projectile system could surely be made to work kinematically if it were effectively a large caliber gun. But carrying enough ammunition to functionally break ice at that scale would be its own challenge. And if you wanted to bomb or nuke ice or something at a much larger scale then I hope you don't need me to respond to the social or environmental considerations.
iwontberude 2y ago
> In fact, no existing U.S. shipyard has built a heavy > polar icebreaker since before 1970. What does since before mean?
- lbcadden3 2y ago
  The last polar icebreaker built in a US shipyard occurred in 1969 or earlier.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
TMS80sNEjcte 2y ago
[flagged]
Animats 2y ago
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.
- everybodyknows 2y ago
  Of course, but then Congress couldn't create a jobs program to scare up a few more votes for the incumbent in certain districts. And so job security triumphs over national security.
  - euroderf 2y ago
    Might as well go all in then and equip the ships with the world's best buggy whips.
aidenn0 2y ago
"Why Johnny can't read" has become "Why the US can't build X" it seems.
mcdow 2y ago
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.
ein0p 2y ago
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.
hluska 2y ago
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.
aylmao 2y ago
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.
- FredPret 2y ago
  You don't like free markets and you cite semi-governmental-department Boeing and too-big-to-fail-gets-bailed-out-every-time banks and auto companies as an example? You'll find free marketeers everywhere complain about these exact companies, for the same reasons.
  - aylmao 2y ago
    I like free markets. I just don't like that China is eating the West's lunch. They just seem better at playing the "free markets" game than anyone on this side of the globe and I think the USA is doubling down on the ideas that defined it in the 1970's, rather than saying— "it's a new world, let's see what we can learn from it to up our game". China has definitely learned plenty from the world, and fundamentally changed the way it does things from 1970 to today. Deng Xiaoping in the 80s marks a stark ideological change that transformed China to the core. Who is the last US president one can say that of?
EasyMark 2y ago
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.
- causal 2y ago
  ?? The author never suggested "the USA is a POS" - they gave a very nuanced breakdown of the factors at play.
- isleyaardvark 2y ago
  One of the article's main points is the US is spending 4-5x as much per ship, I don't know where you get "just won't invest the funds" from that.
mncharity 2y ago
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-forcing-carrier-strike-group-to-scramble-for-fuel/ https://gcaptain.com/us-navy-oiler-usns-big-horn-aground-for...
nasaeclipse 2y ago
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.
- mckravchyk 2y ago
  > The need for icebreaking vessels will remain even as climate change reduces the extent of sea ice: paradoxically, as new polar routes become accessible and sea ice becomes more mobile, the demand for icebreakers is likely to increase.
rr808 2y ago
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.
- Retric 2y ago
  If it was actually more efficient the jones act wouldn’t matter because the other options use US labor and vehicles constructed in the US so it’s a fairly level playing field. Instead the issue is shipping point to point usually saves a lot of overhead compared to ports and the distances involved are rarely enough to offset that overhead. You do see a fair amount of traffic via the Mississippi because that’s actually efficient. Also, people forget about is how much oil, gasoline, and natural gas gets shipped by pipelines. Without that we’d see more ships going from the gulf to east coast cities.
mkoubaa 2y ago
I always felt that Erkanoplans were superior for traveling over ice, especially now that they can be made with carbon fiber
chalcolithic 2y ago
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.
- poincaredisk 2y ago
  You're probably right about the motivation, but >Russia is basically a huge pile of snow Russia is very diverse and it's a huge oversimplification to reduce it to the cold parts. Just like America is not just California, Russia is not just Siberia.

241 points by chmaynard 2y ago

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.

fredgrott 2y ago
they already do see https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/politics/2024/07/10/us-partners-with-canada--finland-to-build-arctic-icebreaker-ships https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/politics/2024/0...
jahewson 2y ago
Technological knowhow is one thing, but the real problem is that we can’t build any kind of ship anymore, neither commercial nor naval: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41456073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41456073
- supportengineer 2y ago
  What about nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers built in Newport News, VA ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newport_News_Shipbuilding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newport_News_Shipbuilding
rjsw 2y ago
That is what is being done with the next class of US Navy frigates [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation-class_frigate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation-class_frigate
- pixelesque 2y ago
  Which itself is turning into a bit of a disaster in terms of how different they are to the original Italian design...
  - seb1204 2y ago
    Yeah, I like to buy that ship again and while you are at it I want you to use imperial bolts, doors opening to the right and extra tall showers. A copy job is never just a copy job.

0xffff2 2y ago

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?

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
> 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? It sounds like it is the former. > If and when the ships are completed (currently 2029 for the first vessel at the earliest), they are expected to cost $1.7-1.9 billion apiece[0], roughly four to five times what a comparable ship would cost to build[1] elsewhere. 0: https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2024-08/60170-Polar-Security-Cutter.pdf https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2024-08/60170-Polar-Securit... 1: https://sixtydegreesnorth.substack.com/p/the-silicon-valley-of-icebreaking https://sixtydegreesnorth.substack.com/p/the-silicon-valley-...
jahewson 2y ago
> Is it that the US ship builders aren't competent Yes, they are woefully uncompetitive. They produce single-digit numbers of commercial oceangoing ships annually, at 2-4x the cost of elsewhere. It’s an industry on life support.
- delfinom 2y ago
  The same industry is currently crying they can't people to work the shipbuilding jobs. Heh
- beloch 2y ago
  Canada has the same problem with building icebreakers. The problem with icebreakers capable of dealing with multi-year ice is that they're a very expensive and specialized kind of ship that's hard to construct, but also the sort of ship that has a very long lifetime. Only a few governments in the world have any need of such ships, and they typically only need a few in the span of many decades. By the time Canada got around to looking for new icebreakers, not a single shipyard in the country had made one in many decades. Ordering a ship from someplace foreign that had actually made one recently would be cheaper than trying to make one domestically. However, then shipyards that haven't made an icebreaker for twenty years would become shipyards that haven't made one for forty years. It really would make a lot of sense for close allies like Canada and the U.S. to collaborate on building icebreakers.

wongarsu 2y ago

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.

thijson 2y ago
Seems so, TSMC had issues with keeping costs under control while building their fab in Arizona. The military is having trouble building submarines and ships at the same rate as China is capable of. Nuclear plants are being built way over cost. I'm reminded of this article which explains why elevators cost so much more here in the USA than the rest of the world: https://archive.is/u7Bp9 https://archive.is/u7Bp9
- davemp 2y ago
  > And plumbing codes in America require an entire network of ventilation piping that has been deemed largely unnecessary in much of the world. There’s a lot of surprising info in that article. This one section that I actually have passing knowledge of is just blatantly false. The majority of US states use and heavily contribute to the international plumbing code which allows for single stack ventilation as described in their linked article. My house from 1958 has single stack ventilation… Sections like that with easily verifiable falsehoods bring the rest of the facts presented by the article into question for me.
kinjba11 2y ago
This seems to be endemic to civilization period. Nobody pays attention until the last one breaks, and by then nobody knows how it's done anymore. I'm reminded of the fleet of ships that repairs undersea data cables, which are looking at aging staffing issues. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40075402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40075402 https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea-deep-repair-ships https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea...

xixixao 2y ago

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.

quasse 2y ago

> 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-shipbuilding-capacity-is-232-times-greater-than-that-of-the-united-states/ 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.

ben7799 2y ago
Interesting. I would conjecture that we have the same cultural issues at this point preventing us from building effective passenger rail systems.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  Passenger rail systems require the procurement of immense amounts of very pricey land, or the transfer of ownership of existing rail lines. I don’t see that as a similar cultural issue. Boat building can be solved by spending money to build boats (and perhaps waiting a couple decades for expertise to be built up). Using eminent domain or changing the view of the public on land rights is a much higher barrier.
  - gottorf 2y ago
    > Boat building can be solved by spending money to build boats (and perhaps waiting a couple decades for expertise to be built up). I actually don't take it for granted that enough money thrown at a problem can automatically solve it. There's a critical mass of underlying assumptions without which the marginal output of each additional dollar supplied becomes so limited that it just doesn't make sense, even with the government money printer.

epistasis 2y ago

> 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.

mmooss 2y ago
[dead]
pitaj 2y ago
I'm sure the Jones Act still plays a part, leading our domestic shipbuilding capabilities (including military and icebreakers) to atrophy in competitiveness.

mmooss 2y ago

> ... 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.

cyberax 2y ago
> How about we let Finland build the icebreakers We can't. Jones Act.
- roywiggins 2y ago
  "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. It’s possible to waive this requirement via presidential authorization[0], but there hasn’t appeared to be much interest in this." [0] https://sixtydegreesnorth.substack.com/p/yes-the-us-coast-guard-can-build https://sixtydegreesnorth.substack.com/p/yes-the-us-coast-gu... "In practice Congress would need to support such a plan by appropriating funds for the project."
- mmooss 2y ago
  We can change the law. It happens every day.
  - roywiggins 2y ago
    Especially since Congress needed to allocate funds for the project anyway, just pass a law that says "buy some ice breakers from Finland, notwithstanding any other laws, and here's 1 billion dollars to do it."
  - xyzzyz 2y ago
    Yes, but repeals of very actively enforced law that's over 100 years old do not happen every day.

ggm 2y ago

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.

aidenn0 2y ago
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41456073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41456073

baggy_trough 2y ago

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

vasco 2y ago

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?

AftHurrahWinch 2y ago
It's not a stupid question, but ice is remarkably durable and has 'self healing properties', to describe ice-cubes sticking together in the most pretentious way possible. There have been projects to make battleships out of ice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk Bonus answer: melting it with a flamethrower would be incredibly expensive because of enthalpy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy
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polairscience 2y ago
I'll answer this as someone who has spent some decent chunk of time on icebreakers. It's hard to really picture what travel through sea ice is like if you haven't done it. Breaking ice isn't that hard... at least if you only have to do it once. But breaking ice for hundreds or thousands of miles is really really hard. Articles like this one tend to gloss over just how specialized every single icebreaker is. And when they build new ones they often try new things to make it easier. My favorite thing I've seen is a set of compressor nozzles that attempt to make it easier for the ship to glide through the ice. FYI, people hear icebreaker and they imagine that the ship literally cracks the ice like a wedge. It's very much less graceful. Icebreakers work like a beached whale where they propel themselves onto the ice and smash it under their weight. When they get stuck many of the ships have the ability to roll to try to break it further. All that said, a projectile system could surely be made to work kinematically if it were effectively a large caliber gun. But carrying enough ammunition to functionally break ice at that scale would be its own challenge. And if you wanted to bomb or nuke ice or something at a much larger scale then I hope you don't need me to respond to the social or environmental considerations.

iwontberude 2y ago

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

lbcadden3 2y ago
The last polar icebreaker built in a US shipyard occurred in 1969 or earlier.
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TMS80sNEjcte 2y ago

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Animats 2y ago

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.

everybodyknows 2y ago
Of course, but then Congress couldn't create a jobs program to scare up a few more votes for the incumbent in certain districts. And so job security triumphs over national security.
- euroderf 2y ago
  Might as well go all in then and equip the ships with the world's best buggy whips.

aidenn0 2y ago

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

mcdow 2y ago

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.

ein0p 2y ago

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.

hluska 2y ago

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.

aylmao 2y ago

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.

FredPret 2y ago
You don't like free markets and you cite semi-governmental-department Boeing and too-big-to-fail-gets-bailed-out-every-time banks and auto companies as an example? You'll find free marketeers everywhere complain about these exact companies, for the same reasons.
- aylmao 2y ago
  I like free markets. I just don't like that China is eating the West's lunch. They just seem better at playing the "free markets" game than anyone on this side of the globe and I think the USA is doubling down on the ideas that defined it in the 1970's, rather than saying— "it's a new world, let's see what we can learn from it to up our game". China has definitely learned plenty from the world, and fundamentally changed the way it does things from 1970 to today. Deng Xiaoping in the 80s marks a stark ideological change that transformed China to the core. Who is the last US president one can say that of?

EasyMark 2y ago

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.

causal 2y ago
?? The author never suggested "the USA is a POS" - they gave a very nuanced breakdown of the factors at play.
isleyaardvark 2y ago
One of the article's main points is the US is spending 4-5x as much per ship, I don't know where you get "just won't invest the funds" from that.

mncharity 2y ago

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-forcing-carrier-strike-group-to-scramble-for-fuel/ https://gcaptain.com/us-navy-oiler-usns-big-horn-aground-for...

nasaeclipse 2y ago

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.

mckravchyk 2y ago
> The need for icebreaking vessels will remain even as climate change reduces the extent of sea ice: paradoxically, as new polar routes become accessible and sea ice becomes more mobile, the demand for icebreakers is likely to increase.

rr808 2y ago

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.

Retric 2y ago
If it was actually more efficient the jones act wouldn’t matter because the other options use US labor and vehicles constructed in the US so it’s a fairly level playing field. Instead the issue is shipping point to point usually saves a lot of overhead compared to ports and the distances involved are rarely enough to offset that overhead. You do see a fair amount of traffic via the Mississippi because that’s actually efficient. Also, people forget about is how much oil, gasoline, and natural gas gets shipped by pipelines. Without that we’d see more ships going from the gulf to east coast cities.

mkoubaa 2y ago

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

chalcolithic 2y ago

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.

poincaredisk 2y ago
You're probably right about the motivation, but >Russia is basically a huge pile of snow Russia is very diverse and it's a huge oversimplification to reduce it to the cold parts. Just like America is not just California, Russia is not just Siberia.