As expected, the Air Force has awarded Northrop Grumman a contract to build the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, the next generation of nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, under a nine-year contract worth $13.3 billion.
The Air Force announced the new contract late Monday.
Northrop’s stock got a boost Wednesday after the news, but the per-share price has since slid back below where it was prior to the Air Force’s announcement. Investors have known for more than a year that Northrop had no competition for the contract, giving markets plenty of time to price in the win before this week.
Northrop Grumman was in a one-horse race for the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) engineering and manufacturing development contract, having driven Boeing — whose Minuteman III missiles the GBSD will replace — from the competition. The upstart’s captive solid rocket motor business, the former Orbital ATK, gave Northrop an edge that Boeing said it could not compete against. The missile use solid rocket motors.
Boeing has reserved its right to protest the award and the competition, but had not done so at deadline Friday.
The Air Force plans to deploy the GBSD beginning before 2030. The service did not announce other terms of the award to Northrop, whose team includes Lockheed Martin and others. The Air Force plans to buy more than 650 GBSD missiles. That will cover 400 to be deployed in silos to replace active Minuteman III missiles, along with test weapons and spares. The entire GBSD program will cost around $100 billion into the 2080s, the service has estimated.
The GBSD will eventually be armed with both W87-0 and W87-1 warheads provided by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). W87-0 refers to warheads now mounted on deployed Minuteman III missiles, and which will be adapted after flight tests for duty on the GBSD.
W87-1 is the planned replacement for the W78 warhead. This new warhead, essentially a copy of the W87 with a new plutonium core, might not be ready to fly aboard the very first GBSD missile, the NNSA has said. The civilian agency needs to upgrade its pit-production facility at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to begin casting new war-usable warhead cores by 2026.
Bechtel Building Launch Infrastructure for Northrop Team
Like a number of defense stalwarts, Bechtel National is part of Northrop’s GBSD team. The Reston, Va.-based contractor will provide “launch infrastructure design and construction,” according to a Thursday press release.
That sort of work is wheelhouse for the company, which has also provided launch silos and infrastructure in Alaska, California, and the Marshall Islands for the Ground-based Midcourse Defense ballistic-missile defense system.
GBSD Award Opens New Training Area For L3Harris
Meanwhile, the award to Northrop also gives L3Harris Technologies an entrée into the service’s training market for global strike systems, the company said this week.
L3Harris said it will do system and software design for at least eight training systems, building on heritage businesses that have trained Air Force pilots, aircrew, and maintainers for more than 90 years.
“GBSD broadens L3Harris Technologies’ business to include ICBM missileers, maintainers and security forces,” the company said in a statement. “L3Harris is developing a common computational platform that enhances training system modularity, commonality and cybersecurity across GBSD. These enhancements are expected to significantly reduce sustainment costs.”
L3Harris also said that its training support for the GBSD will include a “collective trainer for leadership decision making based on the simulation of an advanced situational awareness environment.”
System development work on the training solutions will be done near Dallas, Texas, and hardware development in Tulsa, Okla. The training is expected to occur at Offutt Air Force Base, Neb., and Vandenberg AFB, Calif.
L3Harris said it will also provide support to other portions of the GBSD.
Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor affiliate publication Defense Daily contributed to this report.
