Prime contractor Northrop Grumman will continue its work on the Air Force’s nuclear-tipped, silo-based LGM-35A Sentinel missile as the service and Pentagon acquisition chief William LaPlante consider how to restructure the program, an Air Force official said Monday.
“Work can still continue under the contract that exists today,” Lt. Gen. Andrew Gebara, the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration, told a Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies’ virtual forum. “We don’t want to slow down [or] come to a full stop on the program, but there does need to be a restructuring to get after the cost growth that’s happened. I was on the Hill multiple days last week as part of our team where Dr. LaPlante described the challenges that we’ve had and described his decision to certify [Sentinel as necessary].”
While the Air Force has “largely” retired risk on the missile through test firings of the three stages, the restructuring is to devise cost reduction solutions for the “gargantuan infrastructure challenge–all the launch facilities, all the launch centers, all the wiring that goes into that, that’s the kind of work that we will roll up our sleeves and figure out the best program to provide to get to a Milestone B decision in the future,” Gebara said.
Sentinel will now achieve its initial operational capability several years beyond the 2029 date the Air Force had penciled in, the Pentagon said last week.
Even so, Gebara said Monday that another long-term life extension for Minuteman III, the Boeing-built intercontinental ballistic missile sentinel is supposed to replace, “still does not make sense.”
Gebara spoke a couple weeks after the Pentagon announced, following a Nunn-McCurdy review of the missile, that the agency reversed its 2020 decision to begin Sentinel;s engineering and manufacturing development.
The Department of Defense should not have approved Sentinel for engineering and manufacturing development in 2020 and that “knowledge” around the ground segment in 2020 “was insufficient in hindsight to have a high-quality cost estimate,” LaPlante, who led the missile’s Nunn-McCurdy review, said last week.
The overall cost of Sentinel has grown to nearly $141 billion, 81 percent greater than the September 2020 estimate, according to the Pentagon.
The first Sentinel missiles were to be fitted with W87-0 warheads provided by the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. These weapons would be pulled off of Minuteman III missiles and adapted for use on Sentinel.
Later Sentinel missiles would use W87-1 warheads: newly manufactured weapons designed by the Livermore in California with a freshly cast plutonium pit from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. W87-1 would replace the W78 used on Minuteman III.
A version of this story first appeared in Weapons Complex Morning Briefing affiliate publication Defense Daily.