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 over nine years.
The Air Force announced the new contract late Monday. Last year, the service ballparked the award at around $25 billion. Northrop’s stock was down a bit Tuesday, but the award dropped after the closing bell, before investors had a chance to react to the news.
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 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 GBSD.
W87-1 is the planned replacement for the W78 warhead. This new warhead, essentially a copy of the W87 with a new plutonium pit, 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.
