Air Force Gen. C.Q. Brown, currently the chief of staff of the Air Force, said the U.S. military’s new nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile is on track for a test flight by the end of the year.
Brown, nominated by President Joe Biden (D) to be the top uniformed officer in the U.S. military as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed the long-scheduled, first flight of the missile formerly known as the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent during an interview with the Mitchell Institute for Airpower Studies on Thursday.
Brown was set to succeed Army Gen. Mark Milley as the 21st Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Oct. 1. Brown would be the first black man to hold the post.
“We’re still on track for our first flight and one of the areas where we’ll continue to work very closely with our industry partner on driving down any type of risk getting to that first flight, but also just over the long term,” Brown said.
In his remarks to the Air Force Association, Brown did not elaborate further on Sentinel. He instead focused largely on personnel recruiting challenges and high-level planning issues.
The Northrop Grumman-built LGM-35A Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, also called Sentinel, may miss its planned entry to service around 2029, Gen. Thomas Bussiere, head of Air Force Global Strike Command, said in May.
Established in August 2009, Air Force Global Strike Command is the service’s component of U.S. Strategic Command. The Air Force has planned, and the Air Force budget specifies, that Sentinel will fly by Dec. 31, 2023. The Air Force already has begun preparing its 450 missile silos, launch facilities and 45 missile alert facilities to accept and operate the new missile.
In September 2020, the Air Force awarded Northrop Grumman a potential $13.3 billion sole-source contract to develop Sentinel, which the Air Force at the time named the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent. The Pentagon wants the missile to achieve initial operational capability in 2029 or so.
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said at an Apr. 27 hearing of the House Armed Forces Committee that “at this point as far as I know, we are still holding to the schedule for initial operational capability but my sense of this is that I think it’s gonna be a challenge to make that.”
Sentinel will replace the Minuteman III and will initially carry the W87-0 thermonuclear warhead, refurbished versions of the W87 that the Minuteman now carries. Later in its fielding, the new missiles will be tipped with the W87-1 warhead, a newly manufactured copy of the Minuteman’s W78 warhead, but with a fresh plutonium pit.
The National Nuclear Security Administration’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will provide both warheads. The Los Alamos National Laboratory will provide the first new W87-1 pits.
