America’s Coast Guard Marches North With A Big New Alaskan Base

In a first hesitant step towards reinvigorating the U.S. government’s maritime presence off Alaska, the U.S. Coast Guard, in mid-August, quietly announced that the Alaskan port of Juneau will be upgraded to serve as an icebreaker homeport.

Given that this was America’s first announcement of a new “icebreaker homeport” in more than thirty years, the Coast Guard’s modest, four-paragraph news release was decidedly low-key. Coming just days after Russia announced that their second Project 235500 combat icebreaker, the Nikolay Zubov, will be launched by the end of the year, news that the U.S. Coast Guard was set to install a new, military-ready facility in Alaska merited a far bigger public roll-out.

In Washington, the announcement of Alaska’s new icebreaker homeport was dismissed as, basically, a reward for the Alaskan Congressional delegation’s unceasing efforts at expanding America’s moribund Polar power-and-presence projection capabilities.

But a big new Juneau homeport—an expansion and modernization of the Coast Guard’s busy District 17 Command Center—is no mere piece of pork. Preparations for the new homeport—improved mooring sites, crew facilities and other things—will pump millions into the waterfront and the local economy.

Homeports come with ships, as well. Once the new base facilities are operational, Juneau is slated to receive the interim icebreaker M/V Aiviq, “a U.S. registered ship originally built to serve as an Arctic oil-exploration support vessel.” An imperfect stop-gap, bought by the U.S. government as the Polar Security Cutter program continues to flounder, the Aiviq is doing good service by priming a wave of national investment in Alaskan harbor facilities, potentially readying Alaska to become a host for a range of new ice-ready presence platforms.

The newly-announced multinational Icebreaker Collaboration Effort, or “ICE Pact,” is ideally positioned as a future engine to pump newly-designed ice-breaking-ready “presence” platforms into America’s Arctic and Antarctic waters.

With Russia and China joining forces to try and grab control of lightly-held or internationally-regulated maritime territories, arctic presence, delivered by Alaskan-based vessels that are tailored for the rough polar environment, is becoming a critical unmet U.S. requirement. With Juneau and Kodiak now preparing to accept and support ever-larger Coast Guard cutters and military vessels, seasonal “presence-vessel-ready” facilities in Nome and the Aleutians can follow, along with more maintenance and shipbuilding production sites on America’s western coast.

The tension at the Poles is real. In 2023, the Navy dispatched four destroyers to watch 11 Russian and Chinese vessels operate off Alaska. The U.S. destroyers—USS John McCain, USS Benfold, USS John Finn and the USS Chung-Hoon—were likely pulled from other missions, arriving from every corner of the Pacific to monitor the encroaching and semi-hostile fleet.

This was not a trivial sortie. The distances are so vast that just getting to Alaska is tough. One of the four U.S. destroyers sent north was from San Diego, and a round-trip sortie from San Diego to the Bering Sea is a rough, often ship-breaking trip of over 4,000 miles.

Once the warships arrive on station, keeping America’s front-line destroyers in Alaskan waters poses an even tougher challenge.

As robust as America’s surface combatants are, America’s missile-loaded greyhounds don’t really like heavy weather. In 2007, according to the Navy Times, “more than a dozen Arleigh Burke-class destroyers” suffered “significant structural damage in rough seas because designers didn’t account for the effect of jarring “bow slams” on the ship’s hulls.” While the damage didn’t immediately compromise the damaged vessel’s war-fighting capabilities, the enhanced wear and tear threatened to reduce the life of the hull. And, with the Navy wanting to eke a maximum possible service life out of the destroyer fleet, accountant-admirals at the Navy will be loath to send their precious destroyers into the rough waters of the Bering Sea on a regular basis.

For the U.S. Navy, Alaska operations are a drag on overall readiness. Navy leaders, still struggling to get 75 ships of their 296-ship fleet “mission capable” and ready to deploy, simply cannot meet increased Polar presence demands. But with better shore facilities—and the promise of new, ice-ready, and potentially militarized Navy surveillance craft and non-militarized Coast Guard icebreakers on the way—America will be better positioned to handle future presence demands in Alaskan waters as well as to the south, off the increasingly contested continent of Antarctica.