From The Drive, Sept. 5:
That's if Congress doesn't kill funding for the crucial program entirely first.
As Congress continues deliberating on whether or not fund the U.S. Coast Guard’s desperately needed heavy icebreaker program at all, a congressional watchdog has raised questions about whether the service has done enough to mitigate possible delays and additional costs. Any slip in the planned delivery schedule could leave the United States without any of these specialized ships for an extended period of time and hamper the U.S. government’s ability to operate in the increasingly contested and immensely strategic Arctic region.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released its latest review of what is formally known as the Heavy Polar Icebreaker (HPIB) program on Sept. 4, 2018. The report includes six separate recommendations for the Coast Guard and the Department of Homeland Security, including establishing technology readiness baselines for specific components of the planned ships, updating cost estimates, creating a firm program schedule, formally identifying and analyzing the possible impact of any risk factors, setting up an acquisition plan for the first ship, and clarify how the U.S. Navy might help provide funds in the future to offset any cost growth.
“The Coast Guard – a component of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – did not have a sound business case in March 2018, when it established the cost, schedule, and performance baselines for its heavy polar icebreaker acquisition program,” GAO’s report explained in its executive summary. “GAO’s analysis of selected lead ships for other shipbuilding programs found the icebreaker program’s estimated construction time of 3 years is optimistic. As a result, the Coast Guard is at risk of not delivering the icebreakers when promised and the potential gap in icebreaking capabilities could widen.”
At present, the Coast Guard and the Navy plan to collectively contribute nearly $1 billion over the coming years to the HPIB program with a goal of having the first of three heavy icebreakers in service by 2023. The second and third ships would arrive in 2025 and 2026. After that, the Coast Guard has plans to acquire three more medium icebreakers.
The Coast Guard’s existing icebreaker fleet technically consists of three ships, the USCGC Polar Star, USCGC Polar Sea, and USCGC Healy, the latter of which is a medium icebreaker with a more limited capability to move through ice-filled waters than the two heavy Polar-class ships. The Polar Sea is also in a permanently inactive state, serving as a source of spare parts for its sister ship. Despite undergoing an extensive refit between 2010 and 2012, the 1970s-era Polar Star remains prone to breakdowns and other problems.
GAO’s argument against the HPIB program’s existing cost estimates and delivery schedule is that the Coast Guard laid out its baseline requirements before knowing what shipbuilders would be able to offer, which could lead to “an unstable design, thereby increasing the program’s cost and schedule risks.” In February 2017, the service did hand out five contracts, worth a combined $20 million, for design review studies to Bollinger Shipyards, Fincantieri Marine Group, General Dynamics/National Steel and Shipbuilding Company (NASSCO), Huntington Ingalls, and VT Halter Marine, but it has yet to pick a winner.
In addition, the watchdog says that while the Coast Guard says it plans to use “proven technologies” for the new icebreakers, it did not complete a formal assessment of whether those systems were truly mature and ready to go into the proposed ship. Again, the concern is that any company that ends up building the HPIBs could then uncover unforeseen issues during construction, delaying the work and increasing the ship’s price tag.
The GAO review did say that the Coast Guard’s cost estimate seemed reasonable and well-founded, but noted that it did not include any appraisal of how expensive it might be to operate and sustain the ships. As such, the investigators warned that the service might be undervaluing how much funding the HPIB program will actually need in the long term.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, GAO warned that the complete schedule for acquiring the ships was based on the need to avoid a gap in heavy icebreaker capability rather than any understanding of how much time would be necessary to build the ships. The watchdog noted that almost all major surface ships the Coast Guard and Navy has acquired in recent years took longer to build and also typically came in months behind schedule....
...MUCH MORE
