As it holds out hope for some role in building the next generation of U.S. nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, Boeing continues modernizing parts of the existing fleet, including adding the ability to remotely update launch codes at all 450 missile silos.
The maker of the current Minuteman III fleet, which in 2019 exited the Air Force competition to build the replacement Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD), this year started manufacturing new cryptography hardware for launch silos located in Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming. The company plans to deliver the last of the units, which are made in Heath, Ohio, to the Air Force by 2023, said Ted Kerzie, Boeing’s director of strategic deterrent systems.
Boeing Defense, Space and Security, of Huntington Beach, Calif., is building the cryptographic hardware under a fixed-price contract with the Air Force. Work started in 2018 under a letter contract with the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center. The Air Force finalized the pact in 2019, and the deal is worth roughly $124 million through August 2023.
“Currently, what the Air Force has to do is they go out each year and do manual code or cryptography changes every year,” Kerzie said Tuesday in an interview with Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor. “So you can envision the number of hours and manpower needed to go visit 450 remote sites.”
The Air Force should begin deploying the new cryptography hardware, which is connected by wire to classified information systems that don’t touch the Internet or wireless networks, by the end of December.
“Our first deliveries should be toward the end of the year,” Kerzie said.
The new cryptography units entered the engineering, development, and manufacturing stage of development in fiscal 2013, according to Air Force budget documents. If installed by 2023, that would make them the product of a decade’s worth of work by the Minuteman III incumbent, which last year shook industry watchers when it apparently ceded the prime contract to build and deploy GBSD to rival Northrop Grumman.
The Air Force plans to start replacing Minuteman III missiles with the GBSD around 2029. The new missiles will drop into the old silos. Asked whether the new cryptography hardware might be compatible with the new ICBMs, Kerzie deferred to the Air Force’s GBSD program office.
The Air Force plans to buy 666 GBSD missiles to replace Minuteman III on a one-for-one basis. The Air Force deploys 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles at a time, keeping 50 of its 400 silos in reserve. The extra missiles are for flight tests, and as a hedge against any defective missiles. The Air Force estimates GBSD will cost more than $100 billion over the course of its life. That includes procuring and maintaining the missiles into the 2080s.
Boeing, a mainstay of U.S. nuclear forces since the beginning of the triad as the world knows it, has fewer and fewer footholds at U.S. Strategic Command these days. Kerzie, however, sees possibilities in the upcoming generation of delivery platforms and carrier vehicles, which will deploy in the next 10 to 15 years.
The company made the electrostatically supported gyro navigator that helps guide the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine that launches the Trident II D5 missile. Kerzie said the units could be a fit even for the future submarines such as the Columbia-class submarines that will replace the Ohio boats starting in the early 2030s.
Boeing is also the manufacturer for one of the main components of the nuclear triad’s air-leg: the AGM-86B Air Launched Cruise Missiles with W80-1 nuclear warheads. Until it is replaced by the Raytheon-made Long-Range Standoff weapon missiles in the early 2030s, Boeing personnel will continue logging hours on upkeep of the AGM-86B missile, including at the Guidance Repair Center in Heath.
Of course, Boeing maintains that it still has something to offer the GBSD.
Exactly what that is Kerzie would not say, though he touted Boeing’s expertise with ICBM guidance systems, honed since the early days of the Minuteman program in the 1960s. The Air Force has said Boeing might find work on future GBSD modernization and maintenance programs. That would be similar to the way in which Northrop had a major role refueling Minuteman III during the last decade’s intercontinental ballistic missile modernization program, which ensured the fleet lasts until phased out in the mid-2030s.
The first GBSD missiles could go into the ground with W87-0 warheads now deployed on the Minuteman III, Charles Verdon, deputy administrator for defense programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), told NS&D Monitor earlier this year.
Eventually, the GBSD fleet will use a mixture of W87-0 and W87-1 warheads, all made by the NNSA. W87-1 warheads will have brand new plutonium pit cores, which the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency will initially cast at the Plutonium Facility at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The civilian agency, even amid the COVID-19 pandemic, is working to expand the Plutonium Facility so that it can cast 10 war-ready pits by fiscal 2024.
