Last Minuteman III decommissioned 2050 or later, W87 non-Sentinel test within year

ARLINGTON, Va. — There will likely be a 15-year minimum overlap in silos between the Sentinel and the last Minuteman III, an Air Force Global Strike Command leader said here Monday.

“I think 15 years is probably an ambitious estimate,” Maj. Gen. Stacy Jo Huser, commander of the 20th Air Force in the Air Force Global Strike Command, said at a workshop preceding the Exchange Monitor’s Annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit. “So, one thing that a lot of people don’t realize and our own air units don’t realize is the Sentinel is not just the missile. And this probably offends people in the room, but the missile is easy. The rest of it is the infrastructure.”

Sentinel, being built by Northrop Grumman, will eventually replace the Boeing-made Minuteman III as the Air Force’s silo-based, nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile sometime in the 2030s while the Minuteman III is still commissioned. The last Minuteman III was originally expected to be decommissioned by the mid-2030s. Huser told the Exchange Monitor that it would now be decommissioned by at least 2050.

Meanwhile, John Evans, principal assistant deputy administrator for stockpile management at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), told the Monitor that within the next year “one, perhaps both” of the W87 missiles — the W87-0 which is already in the stockpile and would fly first on the Sentinel, and the W87-1 that would fly next — would do a test flight on a non-Sentinel missile.

Evans said that while a non-Sentinel test would not be the “exact warhead configuration,” the agency can fly the warhead on a test article of the arrowshell the missile would use.

Evans said that the agency is “proceeding as if there is no delay in the Sentinel program.”

“Regardless of the missile schedule, most of the components are agnostic to when the missile is developed, and so we are using enhanced modeling and simulation where we can to understand as best we can the missile environment, and so that we can proceed at our normal pace with relatively moderate risk,” Evans said.

The Sentinel program, managed by the Department of Defense, this year began a congressionally mandated review in the wake of soaring costs. 

In its 2025 budget request, released in March this year two months after the service acknowledged Sentinel’s cost increases, the Air Force said the missile’s first development test flight would launch in February 2026. At one point, Sentinel’s first test flight was on the books for December 2023. 

Brad Wallin, deputy director of strategic deterrence at NNSA, told the Monitor on a planned press tour of Lawrence Livermore in December that the missile rebaseline is affecting flight tests “in the sense that we are thinking, again, with this incredible toolkit that we have about how, if there’s a delay in our ultimate Sentinel flight test, how can we do our best to qualify the warhead itself?”