As severe weather battered parts of the United States in mid-February, the nation's only heavy polar icebreaker was on a rescue mission in the most frozen place on Earth.

Even though it's summer in Antarctica, the US Coast Guard Cutter Polar Star bashed through 150 miles of ice, some of it 20 feet thick, to free a New Zealand fishing vessel trapped about 900 miles northeast of McMurdo Bay.

Adm. Paul Zukunft, the Coast Guard commandant, worried what would have happened if Polar Star herself had gotten stuck. America has only two operational polar icebreakers: Healy, a medium icebreaker, and Polar Star, one of the world's most powerful conventionally propelled icebreaker (her sister ship Polar Sea is inactive). Russia's economy is one-eighth the size of the United States', but with a far longer Arctic coastline has 27 polar icebreakers, including nuclear-powered ones.

Climate change is opening the Arctic to more commercial shipping, energy exploration, mining and tourism. But while Arctic waters are becoming more navigable, ice abounds around both poles, and analysis shows that America needs at least three heavy and three medium polar icebreakers to advance US interests in this hostile environment.

But since its 2013 funding, the Coast Guard acquisition budget has been cut about one-third, to about $1 billion per year, which is insufficient to cover acquisition plans that are already small relative to anticipated future mission demands.

It's an acquisition budget so badly atrophied that it can't cover new polar icebreakers, much less other pressing priorities like enough cutters, inland buoy tenders, boats, aircraft or long-postponed infrastructure investments. The Coast Guard needs at least $500 million more a year, and more like an additional $1 billion, each year in its acquisition account to properly invest in its future.

In response to the reduction in its acquisition account, the Coast Guard has downscaled its procurement plans and postponed major initiatives. Continuing down this path will lead to a Coast Guard that is considerably smaller and older than planned. As Ron O'Rourke of the Congressional Research Service, one of America's leading naval analysts, has highlighted for years, the issue of the size of the Coast Guard's acquisition account poses a profound future budgetary challenge.

Zukunft, during his first state of the Coast Guard address since taking office last May, said the service cannot keep doing more with less. He also noted that while his service has intelligence on 90 percent of known maritime drug movements, it only has enough assets to address 20 percent of them.

Left on this track, the Coast Guard's ability to adequately patrol, police and protect America's vast maritime interests will be badly compromised. As security along the southern US border has been tightened, drug runners increasingly move their illicit cargo to America by sea.

Zukunft added that 450,000 Americans have been killed by drugs or drug violence since 9/11. Others have been treated for their wounds or addiction — at tremendous cost to society. So reaping savings by cutting the Coast Guard budget comes at a greater long-term cost of increased drug availability and the crime and human misery that comes with it. Better to invest upfront in interdiction capabilities that save money and strengthen the nation over time.

Having made the mistake of moving too slowly in modernizing much of the Coast Guard's general-purpose forces, it's critical to develop polar capabilities proactively rather than reactively.

The time to increase investment in the Coast Guard to recapitalize its force is now, not in five or 10 years. Icebreakers are a national investment in capability — like new patrol cutters, missile subs or bombers — that demand additional funding to safeguard America's strategic interests.

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