The Air Force might deploy its Long-Range Standoff Weapon cruise missile earlier than anticipated, while the new Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent intercontinental ballistic missile should be ready on time, the head of the service’s Global Strike Command said Wednesday.
Raytheon will build the Long-Range Standoff missile (LRSO), while Northrop Grumman looks all but certain to win the contract to build the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD), Gen. Timothy Ray said in a webinar with the press hosted by the Mitchell Institute.
“Keep your foot on the gas where you have some outstanding programs,” Ray said. “I think we’ll probably be on time or a little bit early with LRSO, I think we’ll be on time with GBSD.”
Ray said the early selection in April of Raytheon to build the LRSO — the Pentagon effectively dropped Lockheed Martin from the program, though it is keeping some of that company’s ideas on the backburner — could key a faster deployment for the delivery vehicle. The LRSO will replace the Boeing-built, 1980s-vintage nuclear Air-Launched Cruise Missile.
Both the LRSO and GBSD are notionally slated to hit their initial operating capability around 2030. The missiles will carry nuclear warheads provided by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
Charles Verdon, NNSA deputy administrator for defense programs, said in March some of the earlier GBSD missiles might go into the ground tipped with W87 warheads now carried on the existing Minuteman III fleet. Later, the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency would begin mixing W87-1 warheads into the fleet. Those modified warheads would contain new plutonium cores cast at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico starting in 2024, or at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, where the NNSA is building a pit plant it optimistically wants to open by 2030.
The LRSO will use a W80-4 warhead which, like the W87-1, is upstream of a slight clog in the NNSA production schedule. Last year, the agency said it would delay by about two years the first production units — final proof of concept articles — of the B61-12 nuclear gravity bomb and the W88 Alt-370 submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead, to 2022 and 2021, respectively. Unsuitable capacitors needed for both weapons were to blame, according to the NNSA, which now must manufacture workable versions.
In December, Verdon said the NNSA would remove some unspecified, mission-inessential features from the W80-4 and W87-1, decreasing the scope of design and manufacturing needed to create those weapons. The agency hoped that would compensate for the additional time it will now take to mint the other two weapons, components of which are being designed, manufactured, and assembled in the NNSA’s Kansas City National Security Campus and elsewhere.
Also last year, the NNSA’s internal Cost Estimating and Program Evaluation office — which is separate from program offices working specific weapon refurbishments — said the W80-4 first production unit might not be ready by the target date of 2025. The following year is more likely, the office said.
The Air Force plans to buy between 1,000 and 1,1100 LRSO missiles at a cost of almost $11 billion, according to a 2020 report by the Congressional Research Service.
The service also wants to buy more than 600 Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent missiles and deploy 400 of them, the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists estimates. The weapon will cost about $100 billion over the course of its lifetime, well into the 2080s, including a roughly $25 billion engineering and manufacturing development contract to build and deploy them, the Air Force estimates.
