The U.S. Air Force has pulled the plug nearly a year early on Boeing’s contract to mature technology for the next generation of silo-based, nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, the company said this week.
This is another setback for the incumbent on the current Minuteman III missile fleet, which hoped the remaining year of work on its tech-development contract would produce breakthroughs that could persuade the Air Force to unilaterally include Boeing on a team to build the successor to the ICBM, the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD).
“Boeing is disappointed in the Air Force’s decision to not allot additional funding for the GBSD Technology Maturation and Risk Reduction (TMRR) contract,” a Boeing spokesperson wrote Wednesday in an email.”The Boeing team has delivered substantial value under the contract, achieved all contract milestones on time and received strong performance feedback from the Air Force.”
The Washington Post first reported the news Tuesday evening. Boeing is facing stiff, possibly insurmountable, competition from Northrop Grumman to build the GBSD.
Boeing has been trying to convince the Air Force to scrap the current competition for the potentially $25-billion ICBM engineering and manufacturing development contract that hit the street over the summer. Boeing quit the race in early July, saying it could not beat Northrop on price, because its rival owns a solid-fuel rocket motor business: the former Orbital ATK. The GBSD, like Minuteman III, will be solid fueled.
Bids for the GBSD engineering and manufacturing development competition are due in December, with an award due in 2020. Boeing would not comment about whether it would protest the competition prior to or after the award. In September, a senior Boeing GBSD executive would not rule out that option.
Boeing and Northrop Grumman were each awarded three-year contracts in 2017 to develop GBSD prototypes, and both had been expected to compete to produce the ICBM. Boeing’s technology maturation and risk reduction contract was worth $349.2 million: good for an average annual value of just over $115 million through August 2020.
The Air Force would not comment about the contract to the Washington Post this week, other than to say the service did not actually cancel the deal.
The GBSD will carry W87-1-style warheads provided by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. The warheads will fly in Mk-21 re-entry vehicles. Lockheed Martin is developing the technology to adapt the Mk-21 re-entry vehicles, originally built for Boeing-made Peacekeeper missiles, aboard the GBSD, under a new Air Force contract worth up to $138 million over four years. That includes about $100 million in firm funding over a three-year base.
Last week, Ellen Lord, the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, defended the GBSD solicitation, saying that it was “well-written” and would give the Defense Department appropriate insight into the cost of replacing Minuteman III, even without a bid from Boeing.
Lord also told reporters that Boeing could, even if it does not prime the GBSD contract, have a chance to bid on “multiple significant subsystems within GBSD.”
Boeing had pushed the Pentagon to scrap the current GBSD competition and place Boeing and Northrop into a so-called “national team” for the project. The Air Force has declined to do so, and Northrop has declined to do so voluntarily.
Vivienne Machi, reporter for Nuclear Security & Deterrence affiliate publication Defense Daily, contributed to this report from the Pentagon.
