While the U.S. Air Force says it is restructuring the Sentinel next generation nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile program, Senate appropriators are recommending adding $200 million in funds in fiscal 2025.
The Senate Appropriations Committee would bump the $3.7 billion Air Force request for the Northrop Grumman Sentinel to $3.9 billion. The added $200 million would be “for Sentinel industrial base risk reduction and prototyping to keep the supply base healthy and in a position to support the increasing demands of the program,” the committee said last week in its report on a fiscal 2025 defense appropriations bill.
“This funding may be used to strengthen Sentinel program key suppliers, improve supplier efficiency, develop radiation-hardened components for strategic applications, certify metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors, and accelerate workforce development and collaboration with trade schools,” the report said.
The Air Force had targeted May 2029 for initial operational capability for Sentinel, but that date will be several years beyond 2029, the Pentagon said last month.
Following a Nunn-McCurdy review, DoD said that it had reversed its 2020 decision to begin Sentinel engineering and manufacturing development, the phase in Pentagon project management that ends with a manufacturing demonstration. The overall cost of Sentinel has grown to nearly $141 billion, 81% greater than the September 2020 estimate.
“Given the critical nature of this program, the committee is concerned at the lack of urgency with respect to defining programmatic and schedule details, specifying distinct plans and efforts, and, most importantly, establishing a revised schedule to provide a clear way forward and ensure program success,” last week’s report said.
The committee report directed the secretary of the Air Force to provide congressional defense committees with a plan to progress incrementally toward Sentinel’s goals and a plan to achieve a master schedule.
Last week, Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), ranking member of the Senate Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee who has some of the Minuteman III silos in her state, told a Washington think tank Heritage Foundation forum on nuclear weapons that DoD needs to accelerate Sentinel.
“When we’re in classified briefings and I hear from the military and the department, they give me dates on when things are going to be ready, and I always look at them and go, ‘that’s too late,’” Fischer said.
A version of this story first appeared in Exchange Monitor affiliate publication Defense Daily.