WASHINGTON — Will the U.S. Air Force need to build new intercontinental ballistic missile “launch facilities”–siloes–to accommodate the LGM-35A Sentinel?
“Looks to me like they’re going to have to,” Sen. Angus King (I-Me.), the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s strategic forces panel, told Exchange Monitor-affiliate Defense Daily Tuesday.
The provision of multiple warheads, countermeasures, and increased range to hit China means the design of the Northrop Grumman Sentinel is significantly larger than that of the current Boeing Minuteman III.
The Air Force fielded 450 Minuteman siloes between 1962 and 1967, of which 50 are decommissioned but may be brought back for future testing. Experts have said that placing Sentinel in Minuteman siloes may lead to several degrees of tilt in such siloes.
The first operational Minuteman fielded on Oct. 27, 1962 at Malmstrom AFB, Mont., during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Air Force Global Strike Command (AFGSC) has been planning to “renovate all 450 existing launch facilities in the missile fields to like-new condition”–siloes under the three missile wings at F.E. Warren AFB, Wyo., Minot AFB, N.D., and Malmstrom.
“We’re looking at that right now,” Air Force Gen. Thomas Bussiere, the head of AFGSC, told the Exchange Monitor on Tuesday at Capitol Hill when asked whether the Air Force needed new siloes for Sentinel rather than modernizing and reusing the Minuteman siloes. “The acquisition professionals and my operators are part of the process post Nunn-McCurdy looking at how we do that.”
On Jan. 18 last year, the Air Force said that it notified Congress that Sentinel had breached Nunn-McCurdy cost guidelines, primarily due to construction design changes, and then DoD acquisition chief William LaPlante ordered a root-cause analysis. The latter led last summer to the DoD decision to continue the program. The DoD cited its importance to strategic deterrence, and the rescinding of the Sentinel Milestone B engineering and manufacturing development go ahead from 2020.
Last summer, the Air Force pegged Sentinel cost at $140.9 billion, 81% higher than the September 2020 estimate when the program was approved for the engineering and manufacturing development phase –a rise that DoD said has less to do with the missile than the command-and-control segment, including siloes, launch centers, “and the process, duration, staffing, and facilities to execute the conversion from Minuteman III to Sentinel.”
LaPlante said last summer that in “hindsight,” Sentinel should not have been approved to start EMD. He also said the “knowledge” around the ground segment in 2020 “was insufficient in hindsight to have a high-quality cost estimate.” That knowledge is more mature now, he said at the time.
Bussiere said on Tuesday that a “re-establishing” of Milestone B is to occur in the next 18 months.
DoD said last summer that the Sentinel restructuring will address root causes of the breach, create a management structure to control future costs, and scale down/simplify missile siloes to speed the transition from Minuteman III to Sentinel.
Fiber optic, high-bandwidth cables to replace the Minuteman III’s underground network of the copper wired Hardened Intersite Cable System may allow a halving of the number of intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) Launch Control Centers from the 45 now under the three ICBM bases.
Air Force plans have called for a Sentinel launch center for at least 24 of the missile alert facilities and for 3,100 miles of new utility corridor for Sentinel.
On Tuesday, Sen. King said that he is worried that the cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency “may not understand the strategic importance of this project [Sentinel] and just say, ‘Oh. Here’s a big pot of money.'”
Sarah Salem and Frank Wolfe from Defense Daily contributed to this report from Washington.
