There’s also law enforcement. If we do have critical infrastructure in the Arctic, and another nation or a nongovernmental entity wants to compromise that infrastructure, we need to make sure we can protect that.

And if you do have a contingency, such as a major oil spill or mass rescue, it’s an area where there really is no shore infrastructure, so your response really needs to be led from the sea. The icebreaker is your floating command post. Those are some of the things that an icebreaker needs to do – and that’s just for the Coast Guard. It doesn’t include what the National Science Foundation would want an icebreaker to do, the Arctic Research Commission, or the Department of Interior. A number of other stakeholders have equity in the Arctic, and you want to make sure this icebreaker satisfies the needs of all of those stakeholders, which a Polar-class cutter does not do today.

Obama proposed to speed up the acquisition of a Coast Guard icebreaker, but absent a congressional authorization, it’s not clear where the money would come from.

What I’m looking at is: How can I expedite the time line for a major acquisition? It will really be up to lawmakers to find the funding, because certainly my current operating base does not have the resources to build an icebreaker. So it will require legislative action to provide that appropriation to enable the Coast Guard to carry out the president’s vision.

In a time of uncertainty, we’re seeing record levels of sea ice receding in the summer months, bringing more severe storms – and with those storms, more silting.

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.

The good news is the president could not have been clearer about his intent and our need, as an Arctic nation, to make this investment. It now comes down to implementation. But we will do everything we can to accelerate that time line.

You mentioned the necessity of having an at-sea platform, because of the lack of shore infrastructure in the Arctic. *Earlier this year, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released its draft report on the feasibility of expanding the Port of Nome into the first deepwater port near the Alaska Arctic. Do you have any thoughts on the Port of Nome?

We actually worked with the Corps of Engineers as they looked at several proposals. Nome was one. Port Clarence, Alaska, was another, a natural deepwater port that provides a beachhead, if you will. But you need the rest of it as well – the intermodal link to either a railway or a highway system – to really make that port into a logistical hub, because the nearest deepwater port is Dutch Harbor, and if you’re operating in the Arctic, that’s about a 1,000-mile transit, one way, to refuel and re-provision. So clearly a deepwater port to sustain operations is going to be critical for the Arctic going forward.

Quite honestly, I was hopeful that perhaps the oil and gas industry might be incentivized, if we saw that activity continue, because they have to make that same transit as well. But we may not see that any time soon, with Shell’s announcement. There may not be other interest, at least not in the near term, for that sector to look at other investment opportunities, because they did much the same down in Port Fourchon, Louisiana. If you look at that port, much of that is all sustained by the oil and gas industry. They certainly have the means to do so without necessarily relying on the federal government to provide that resource.

Do you think the physical description of the Port of Nome, as proposed, would be adequate for what the Coast Guard wants to do up there? There seems to be some disagreement over whether it will be deep enough.

That will be a challenge. There’s an environmental challenge when it comes to dredging. And I think then you have to look at what the seasonal patterns are. Is this a channel that is going to fill with silt on a recurring basis? What is the life cycle cost of maintaining that port? In a time of uncertainty, we’re seeing record levels of sea ice receding in the summer months, bringing more severe storms – and with those storms, more silting. And I mention that only because when I was in Barrow, Alaska, earlier this month, they experienced the equivalent of about a Category 1 hurricane. And in the middle of it all, they had bulldozers in the surf, trying to pile up sand to prevent saltwater intrusion. So you don’t have the kind of ice barrier you used to, preventing these storms from wreaking havoc. And I think all of that needs to be factored in as you start looking at a deepwater port. How do you maintain that for 20 or 30 years in an environment that is very difficult to predict right now?