Slips in the planned schedule for some parts of the Northrop Grumman LGM-35A Sentinel ICBM will occur, but the Air Force is focused on ensuring that the Sentinel is ready on time, the head of Air Force Global Strike Command, said May 4.
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 (IOC) in 2029 or so.
“I don’t want to critique the way we do business in the department, but we’re three years into a seven-year engineering design phase,” Air Force Gen. Thomas Bussiere told a Hudson Institute audience in response to a question on possible Sentinel fielding delays. “This is a massive program. Where we are right now is there will be delays in different parts of the program, but the department has put a lot of focus on making sure we meet the operational needs’ IOC. We’ll see how the years play out, but I’m optimistic because of the level of oversight. That provides me comfort.”
Established in August, 2009, Air Force Global Strike Command (AFGSC) is the service’s component of U.S. Strategic Command.
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee on Apr. 27 that Air Force acquisition chief Andrew Hunter and Bill LaPlante, head of acquisition at the Pentagon, recently made an adjustment to the Sentinel program and that reaching Sentinel IOC on time will be a challenge.
Kendall did not detail in his testimony what the Sentinel program adjustment entails.
“It’s also been a very long time since we did an ICBM like this so we don’t have the sort of recent experience we’d like to have,” Kendall said at the Apr. 27 hearing. “At this point as far as I know, we are still holding to the schedule for IOC, but my sense of this is that I think it’s gonna be a challenge to make that.”
Sentinel’s schedule “is of utmost importance to us … given that we have a no bid/no competition contractor so we’re gonna watch it closely,” Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) told Kendall at the hearing. Kendall must recuse himself from Sentinel decisions because of his previous consulting work for Northrop Grumman.
A Selected Acquisition Report released last year noted that the Sentinel program has had schedule difficulties related to cleared personnel staffing, classified information technology infrastructure, and booster electronics development.
Last month, Northrop Grumman said that it had recently completed the first full-scale static test of a Sentinel solid rocket motor at the company’s test facility in Promontory, Utah, as the company readies for possible first flight of a Sentinel prototype this year.
A Defense Department report sent to Congress last September indicated a possible 10-month delay in the Sentinel development effort, yet Air Force Brig. Gen. Ty Neuman, the service’s director of concepts, said in February that Northrop is still on track to perform a full-scale inaugural flight test in 2023. The Air Force’s estimated acquisition cost for the 634 Sentinel missiles is $95.8 billion, while estimated life-cycle costs into the 2070s are nearly $264 billion.
Sentinel features a three-stage booster rocket. Northrop Grumman, which has an in-house solid rocket motor business, will make the missile’s first- and second-stage solid motors. Aerojet Rocketdyne, the last independent U.S. provider of solid rocket stages, will make the third-stage motor.
Sentinel will initially carry the W87-0 thermonuclear warhead, refurbished versions of the W87 from the Minuteman missiles it will replace. 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.
This story first appeared in Exchange Monitor affiliate publication Defense Daily.
