U.S. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said on Nov. 13 that, of the two service legs of the triad, he is more concerned about the Northrop Grumman [NOC] LGM-35A Sentinel next generation ICBM than the company’s B-21 Raider strategic stealth bomber.
“So far, the B-21 is doing fine,” Kendall told a Center for a New American Security (CNAS) virtual forum. “Sentinel is, quite honestly, struggling a little bit. There are unknown unknowns that are surfacing that are affecting the program and that the department is gonna have to work its way through. I’m more nervous of the two about Sentinel. They are both essential programs. We have to do them.”
Sentinel is complex–a complexity that lies not solely in missile development, but also in the vast real estate development and command and control that underpin the program, he said.
Kendall has said that he is not permitted to make decisions on B-21 and Sentinel because of his previous consulting work for Northrop Grumman.
Sentinel is to achieve initial operational capability (IOC) in May 2029 to begin replacing the 400 Boeing [BA]-built Minuteman IIIs.
In June, six Republican senators, including Deb Fischer (Neb.), the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s (SASC) strategic forces panel, introduced a bill to authorize multi-year procurement (MYP) authority for Sentinel (Defense Daily, June 22).
A Defense Department report sent to Congress in September last year indicated a possible 10-month delay in the estimated $95.8 billion Sentinel development effort.
While the Air Force has said that Sentinel is to begin flight testing by the end of this year, Kendall told the House Armed Services Committee in April that it will be a challenge for Sentinel to reach IOC on time (Defense Daily, Apr. 27).
During the Nov. 13 CNAS forum, Kendall criticized the former Trump administration’s starting “too many [research and development] projects” for the sake of innovation, not fielding, and said that the Air Force’s major challenge now is not deciding what to buy, but rather getting Congress to appropriate $30 billion over the next five years–including $5 billion in fiscal 2024–for the Air Force’s seven operational imperatives, which Kendall laid out last year.
He said that “possibly my entire tenure in office will be spent waiting for money” for programs prioritized early on.
The first of the service’s operational imperatives–space order of battle–“is the broadest,” Kendall said.
“The short version of this is that we essentially have a Space Force that is a bit like a country having a merchant marine, and we woke up and realized we needed a navy,” he said. “We’ve got to build the navy. The Air Force is a different situation. It needs to modernize, but it doesn’t need to start from the same place. We have a small number of satellite systems that were designed with the assumption of impunity, that they wouldn’t be attacked. That’s no longer true. We need to have resilient capabilities in space. We also need to have capabilities to go after what the other side is putting in space. China has been pursuing targeting systems that are linked to its increasingly longer-range precision weapons and coming after some of our highest value assets. We cannot let them have that capability with impunity. We need counterspace capabilities as well, and, of course, we need battle management to tie it all together.”