The U.S. Air Force said Tuesday it plans to award a contract sometime between July and September 2020 for production of the United States’ next nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile.
The service plans to buy more than 600 Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) missiles, about 400 of which will go into silos starting around 2028 to replace the aging, Boeing-built Minuteman III fleet. Only Boeing and Northrop Grumman, the two companies maturing competing GBSD designs, will compete to build and field the new missiles.
The planned GBSD engineering and manufacturing development contract will have options for five batches, or production lots, of missiles. That will include building and deploying the missile.
The Air Force did not reply to a request for comment this week.
Boeing and Northrop are in the final year of a competition, under three-year Pentagon contracts awarded in 2017 and respectively worth about $350 million and $330 million, to design the next-generation missile. The Air Force estimates it will spend between roughly $85 billion and $100 billion to procure the GBSD, according to the Washington-based nongovernmental Arms Control Association.
The GBSD will carry W87-1 warheads provided by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The W87-1 will be a new manufacture of an old design: the W87 warhead used on the Minuteman III.
The W87-1 will cost between $10 billion and $15 billion over the 20 years ending around 2040, the NNSA estimated last year. The agency plans to spend $30 billion over several decades beginning this year on specialized plutonium-manufacturing infrastructure needed to produce the pits, or triggers, for the warheads.
The NNSA is scheduled in 2024 to begin producing W87-1 pits at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The civilian agency then plans to upgrade pit facilities at Los Alamos and build a new pit plant in South Carolina to ramp up production of W87-1 cores to 80 a year by 2030. However, multiple internal studies concluded the agency probably will not hit its target throughput by that date.
The NNSA will initially focus on production of W87-1-style pits.
House Democrats, meanwhile, want to slow the GBSD. In defense authorization and spending bills passed this summer, the lower-chamber’s majority proposed funding cuts for both the Pentagon and NNSA side of the program.
The House-passed bills would provide some $460 million for the GBSD in fiscal 2020: nearly 20% less than the $570 million the White House requested. For W87-1, the bills would provide under $55 million for 2020, less than half the $110-plus million the Trump administration sought.
The bills would fund the NNSA’s pit-funding Plutonium Sustainment account at about $470 million: nearly 35% below the request.
But House Democrats are essentially alone on Capitol Hill in their desire to slow the ICBM program.
While the Senate has yet to write any appropriations bills, the upper chamber authorized $590 million for the GBSD in a fiscal 2020 National Defense Authorization Act that cruised through the the approval process with plenty of support from Democrats. The Senate also authorized the requested 2020 funding for the NNSA’s plutonium programs.
