The Navy's New $440 Million Warship Will Spend the Winter Frozen to a Dock in Canada

The USS Little Rock looks like it was designed by a committee of 12 year old Transformers enthusiasts—that is, like a sports car speedboat battleship with guns that go pew pew pew. It cost the United States about $440 million and is part of a new category of ultraversitile warship known as the littoral class: "a fast, agile, mission-focused- platform designed for operation in near-shore environments yet capable of open-ocean operation."

What the Little Rock does not do is fly. This ugly-as-sin futureboat is, ultimately, still just a boat. It was built at a shipyard in Wisconsin and spent the summer of 2017 in trials on Lake Michigan. It was commissioned last month in Buffalo, New York. From there, it's next stop was to be its home port in Florida. As it turns out, the Little Rock will be a few months late. Because winter.

As reported by the Washington Post, the Little Rock is currently docked in Montreal. It's stuck. The Saint Lawrence Seaway, the Great Lakes' outlet to the Atlantic Ocean, is frozen over.

While colder-than-average temperatures in the Northeast haven't helped, this is actually normal. The freshwater Seaway (and the Great Lakes shipping system, generally) normally closes to shipping between December and March because of ice.

In any case, this winter stopover for the USS Little Rock wasn't planned. “Significant weather conditions prevented the ship from departing Montreal earlier this month and icy conditions continue to intensify,” offered a statement from the Navy.

“The temperatures in Montreal and throughout the transit area have been colder than normal, and included near-record low temperatures, which created significant and historical conditions in the late December, early January timeframe.”

There are some ships actually designed for this. Ice-ready ships usually aren't even what we'd normally think of icebreakers. These are just normal boats built for cold climates.

Ships with this capability are rated according to "ice class," a loose classification system corresponding to how much extra strengthening a ship's hull has. Ice class ships range from Scandinavian ferry boats to Russia's "polar corvette" take on littoral battleships. Indeed there's anxiety among military types in the US about an "icebreaker gap" between the US and Russia. That is, we don't really have fast battleships that can fight in the Arctic, while Russia does.

We're assured that the 70 person crew is making the most of their time in port, working on training and certifications and other assorted boat stuff. And, as far as places to be stuck in the winter, they're probably better off in Montreal than, say, Buffalo. There's nothing like a steaming pile of poutine on a cold ass day.