To close that gap, we have nearly doubled our Coast Guard presence down in that area to exploit what is quite honestly a very target-rich environment. But the targets are provided by the entire interagency collaboration. So it really is a team effort for us to enjoy the successes that we’ve had. In August, I met the crew of the Stratton in San Diego, when they returned off of a four-month patrol with 32 metric tons of cocaine. We have the Bertholf out there right now. And they’ve already seized about 18 metric tons on this deployment alone. So in one deployment alone, I pay for a national security cutter, in terms of the dollar value of what is being removed. So these assets are really having a great return on investment because that’s not money that is going into the hands of these drug traffickers who are undermining rule of law and regional stability, especially in Central America.

When the National Security Cutter Waesche left its counter-drug patrol off the Central American coast in June to support operations in the Arctic, several news outlets viewed that as an example of the Coast Guard’s resources being stretched beyond their capacity. What challenges does a maritime Arctic present to the Coast Guard, and what has the service done to meet the objectives of the “Arctic Strategy” it released two years ago?

Well, one of the big challenges is domain awareness. What else is going on up there? This last year, you had over 200,000 tourists on cruise ships on the Atlantic side of the Arctic – and an Arctic that had traditionally been covered with sea ice, which means what’s below that ice has not been charted. What is the depth? Are there pinnacles or hazards to navigation? Less than 5 percent of that entire domain is charted to 21st century standards.

Since the State of the Coast Guard Address, I’ve traveled to Iceland. I was on the Icelandic coast guard vessel Thor, and I talked with the captain and looked at his charts – and the datum is from 1915. And I said: “When you’re up in the Arctic, how do you know there’s not a hazard to navigation up there?” He said: “Well, I don’t. I send my smallboat in front of me with a side-scan sonar.” It was almost like picking your way through a minefield, and they’re updating charts as they move along. But then off in the distance, there was a cruise ship flying along at 20 knots through these very same waters, temperatures just above freezing. Someday they may find one of those hazards – and there may be a mass loss of life.

So safety of life at sea is a big challenge. Next year there will be a cruise ship that will transit the Northwest Passage from west to east, starting at the Bering Sea and then coming out through the other side over by Greenland. Passengers are paying premium dollars for this experience, and if they enjoy it, there will probably be other cruise ships, more passengers, and then with that exposure and number of repetitions, there’s a good likelihood that one of those ships will eventually stumble upon something. And do we have the means to carry out a mass rescue? I cannot say with absolute conviction that we are a Coast Guard that is Semper Paratus [Always Ready] for a mass rescue in the Arctic domain.

We’ve been monitoring what Shell [Americas] is doing in the oil exploration field, and you probably heard recently that the company’s CEO, Marvin Odum, said they’ve decided offshore Arctic oil isn’t a lucrative enterprise. So Shell does not expect to be back next year. But at the same time, we’re an Arctic nation. We’ve seen a significant increase in human activity up in this domain – including some gestures from Russia indicating they intend to militarize the Arctic.

And so next month when I meet with the other Arctic Council nations, and we establish the Arctic Coast Guard Forum, we’ll try to use our respective coast guards as means to focus on what really matters most in the Arctic, which is the safety of life at sea, the environment, and protecting the way of life for the indigenous tribes who have lived up there for thousands of years. Those are some of the areas we’re working in, both within the Coast Guard and also multilaterally, with our other partners as well.

When President Barack Obama visited the Arctic this summer, the news media made a lot out of the difference in the size of the icebreaker fleets of Russia – 41 – and the United States, which has been down to two since the Polar Sea’s engines failed in 2010. How many icebreakers does the Coast Guard need to meet its mission requirements at the poles?

This year the crew of the Polar Star – right now, our only operational heavy icebreaker – will be away from home well in excess of 300 days, both in operating and maintenance. In years past, we would not have dragged one crew through that knothole. There would be another ship ready to go, and it would provide us a little bit of excess capacity if we needed to send that cutter up north into the Arctic as well. Well, we don’t have that anymore. We’re a one-trick pony with one heavy icebreaker. So the bare minimum I think we need is two heavy icebreakers, with the provision that we still have our one medium icebreaker, Coast Guard Cutter Healy.

Then how do I accelerate that time line? What does it take to build a new icebreaker? We haven’t cut steel on one, a heavy icebreaker, in over 40 years. So we need to look to be creative here. Let’s look who else has designs for heavy icebreakers. Might we be able to acquire those plans and accelerate the time line of what it takes to build it? Or can industry say: “We can build this within this time constraint, and by the way, we do have a design for a heavy icebreaker”? But we can’t even engage in those dialogues yet, absent an appropriation of at least the seed money to allow this program to flourish.

But before we go further, we need to look at what we’ll need an icebreaker of the 21st century to do. It would behoove us that we would have an icebreaker that could meet the environmental standards of the Polar Code [adopted by the International Maritime Organization in 2014, and which the Coast Guard helped to draft]. If we’re going to be part of that governance process, then we should probably follow the ground rules that we helped write. Our Polar-class cutters are not in compliance environmentally with that Polar Code.

And then what else do you need an icebreaker to do, besides break ice? We have followed the protocols of the Law of the Sea Convention when it comes to mapping beyond the extended continental shelf, and there is an area roughly about twice the size of the state of California that is technically the sovereign waters of the United States – and we’ve seen other nations conduct research in these very same waters. So there’s an element of protecting your sovereign rights, which an icebreaker will need to consider as well.