The Coast Guard currently plans to hold its production readiness reviews in March 2024 for its first new heavy icebreaker but a congressional auditing agency last week warned that this timeline is overly optimistic given current progress in designing the ship.
“Notwithstanding the program’s plans to ensure the shipyard completes functional design prior to required production readiness reviews, our analysis indicates the ability to hold those reviews with completion is years away unless the design maturity improves significantly faster than in the past,” the Government Accountability Office (GAO) says in its latest report on the Polar Security Cutter (PSC) program.
From Sept. 2021, which GAO says is the earliest the Coast Guard could provide design maturation data, through March 2023, the functional design of the ship has progressed about 3 percent every six months and the transitional design 6 percent. As of March, the functional design was 57 percent complete and the transitional design 39 percent.
“At that design completion rate, it would take the shipyard approximately eight years to complete functional design,” says the report, Coast Guard Acquisitions: Polar Security Cutter Needs to Stabilize Design Before Starting Construction and Improve Schedule Oversight (GAO-23-105949).
The Polar Security Cutter (PSC) is already well behind in its original design schedule. The original schedule called for a mature design by March 2021, leading to delivery of the first ship about three years later, a very aggressive and unlikely schedule, the GAO says in its latest report on the cutter.
The report looks at 10 lead ships that the Navy and Coast Guard delivered between 2008 and 2018 that include vessels smaller and larger than the PSC and found only three were delivered in less than three years. The Coast Guard’s current medium polar icebreaker, the Healy, took nearly 4.5 years to construct, GAO says.
The report also highlights the Coast Guard’s medium-endurance Offshore Patrol Cutter program, which is two years behind the original delivery schedule and lacked a design maturity assessment when the acquisition program baseline was set.
The Coast Guard has set a revised delivery date of the first half of 2026 for the first PSC although Adm. Linda Fagan, the Coast Guard Commandant, recently told a Senate panel that it will be at least 2028 before that ship is delivered (Defense Daily, July 13). She also said it will take at least four years to build the ship.
GAO cites Coast Guard program officials as saying the design rate will pick up and that other work done by the shipbuilder has not been factored into the completion rates. The program officials also told the auditor that the sale VT Halter Marine, which won the PSC contract in 2019, to Bollinger Shipyards in Nov. 2022, slowed progress on the design.
The Coast Guard is conducting a formal program assessment that it expects to complete this October to include a new integrated master schedule.
The PSC will replace the nearly 50-year-old Polar Star, the Coast Guard’s lone heavy polar icebreaker. The Polar Star is undergoing annual service life extensions so keep it operational to perform an annual mission to Antarctica to resupply a U.S. science team that works there. The service hopes to retire the ship once the second PSC is operational.
Currently, the Coast Guard plans to acquire three PSCs with a life-cycle cost of nearly $12 billion. A service fleet mix analysis has shown it needs eight or nine polar icebreakers consisting of heavy and medium ships.
A heavy polar icebreaker has not been built in the U.S. for nearly 50 years, pointing to a lack of domestic experience that in turn complicates design and construction considerations of these vessels, GAO says. It also says that the PSC is a complex ship, further challenging the design.
The Coast Guard is hoping to acquire a commercial polar icebreaker to fill a gap in its icebreaking needs. Congressional appropriators are on board with the $150 million request for the off-the-shelf vessel.