The House Appropriations Committee is recommending a $324 million cut to the U.S. Air Force’s research and development request of $3.7 billion for the Northrop Grumman LGM-35A Sentinel future intercontinental ballistic missile.
“This decrease is the result of insufficient justification and program uncertainty for execution needs in fiscal year 2025,” according to the House Appropriations Committee version of the fiscal 2025 defense appropriations bill, which passed on Thursday 34-25. “While supportive of the capability, the committee was stunned to learn about the critical program acquisition unit cost breach of at least 37 percent, and an average procurement unit cost breach of at least 19 percent that were determined following a review of the program in December 2023.”
“The committee acknowledges the technical challenges and complexity of an undertaking of this magnitude,” the report said. “However, the committee is concerned that the issues driving the critical overruns were not identified sooner, the level of flawed technical assumptions, and the management continuity of the program. The committee is concerned that lack of continuity in program management for such a critical program as Sentinel is contributing to poor program performance, cost overruns, and schedule slips.”
As a result, the report advises the U.S. comptroller general, who heads the Government Accountability Office, “to assess the impact of turnover in program managers on the performance of the Sentinel program and provide a report of this assessment to the congressional defense committees not later than 180 days after the enactment of this act.”
DoD’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) is to finish a Nunn-McCurdy review of Sentinel by the end of this month.
The Air Force told Congress in January that the bill for Sentinel had risen above the Nunn-McCurdy’s 25 percent critical cost breach threshold to an estimated $125 billion, a 37 percent increase from the previous $95 billion estimate.
The per-unit cost for missiles rose to $162 million from $118 million in 2020 in what Air Force officials have attributed to unforeseen construction costs, including new silos and wiring.
Air Force Global Strike Command’s (AFGSC) Site Activation Task Force, established by Section 1638 of the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, is to provide Sentinel with missileers’ insights.
Air Force Brig. Gen. Colin Connor heads the task force as AFGSC’s director of ICBM modernization at Barksdale AFB, La.
Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) and Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), the co-chairs of the congressional Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control Working Group, said that they plan to hold a working group hearing on cost overruns of nuclear modernization programs on July 24.
Exchange Monitor affiliate publication Defense Daily originally posted this story.
