Two key nuclear delivery systems, the Long Range Standoff Weapon cruise missile and the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) intercontinental ballistic missile should be ready on time — the cruise missile might even be early, the head of Air Force Global Strike command said Wednesday.
Raytheon [RTX] will build the Long Range Standoff weapon (LRSO), while Northrop Grumman [NOC] looks all but certain to win the contract to build the GBSD, Gen. Timothy Ray said in a webinar with the press hosted Wednesday morning 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.”
Both weapons are notionally slated to hit their initial operating capability in 2030 or so. Both weapons will carry nuclear warheads provided by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
In March, Charles Verdon, the NNSA deputy administrator for defense programs, said some of the earlier GBSD missiles might go into the ground tipped with W87 warheads now used aboard the Minuteman III missiles GBSD will replace. Later, the NNSA would begin mixing W87-1 warheads into the fleet. Those modified warheads would contain new pit cast at Los Alamos National Laboratory starting in 2024, or at the Savannah River Site, where the NNSA is building a pit plant it optimistically wants to open by 2030.
LRSO will use a W80-4 warhead which, like the W87-1, is upstream of a slight clog in the NNSA nuclear security enterprise. Last year, the agency said it would delay 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: delays of about two years. Unsuitable capacitors were to blame, NNSA said.
In December, Verdon said the NNSA would descope the requirements of W80-4 and W87-1 slightly to help offset the delay to the other two weapons, components of which are now being designed, manufactured and assembled in the NNSA’s Kansas City National Security Campus and elsewhere.
Also last year, the NNSA’s internal Cost Evaluation 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 in 2025, the agency’s current target. A likelier date was 2026, the independent office said.
On Wednesday, Ray said that picking Raytheon to build LRSO — the Pentagon effectively dropped Lockheed Martin from the program, though it is keeping some of Lockheed Martin’s ideas on the backburner — could key a faster deployment for the delivery vehicle, which will replace the Boeing-built, 1980s-vintage nuclear Air Launched Cruise Missile.