The U.S. Air Force is examining how to reduce the massive civil works project costs that make up a significant part of the Northrop Grumman [NOC] LGM-35A Sentinel future ICBM program, Air Force officials said on Jan. 24.
The service last week informed Congress of a 37 percent unit cost Nunn-McCurdy program breach–an increase in unit cost per missile from $118 million in 2020 to $162 million. The total program cost is now more than $125 billion compared to more than $95 billion earlier.
“My hope is that through the end of this process we’ll be able to fine tune the [Sentinel] program and reduce risk moving forward but that there won’t be a decision made that we can live without it,” acting Air Force Comptroller Kristyn Jones told a Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) forum. “Nuclear modernization is core to our national defense, and I believe that the vast majority of Congress also agrees with that.”
“We believe very strongly that nuclear modernization will continue and that we just need to make some changes on how we’re operating the program, dial in some of those costs moving forward, and continue the oversight we’ve had but focusing much more on how we’re moving in the future,” she said.
Jones said that some parts of Sentinel are “not seeing significant cost growth,” including “the missile itself.”
Federal civil works projects have traditionally been “challenging, especially the last couple of years, given the macroeconomic environment, the labor force, military construction supply chain,” she said. “We had to notify Congress of a significant deviation to the original program cost. There is a process underway that OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense) will lead, that we will be heavily involved in looking at the program for a number of dimensions, where there are opportunities for bringing the costs down. We’ve looked at that pretty extensively already, but that will continue.”
“The management structure of the program is another area that we’re looking at,” Jones said. “We already have some ideas that we’re working on to see how we can source that.”
Two months ago, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall hinted at Sentinel’s struggles in saying that unanticipated problems were “surfacing that are affecting the program and that the department is gonna have to work its way through” (Defense Daily, Nov. 13, 2023).
Kendall said that much of the program’s complexity lies in the vast real estate development and command and control that underpin the program.
The plan has been for Sentinel to achieve initial operational capability (IOC) in May 2029 to begin replacing the 400 Boeing [BA]-built Minuteman IIIs, but Kendall said last April that meeting the IOC date would be a challenge (Defense Daily, Apr. 27, 2023). The Air Force has said that a service life extension of the Minuteman IIIs is not viable.
Air Force officials have said that the Northrop Grumman B-21 Raider bomber–the other, future Air Force leg of the nuclear triad–is on track.
“We have predicted that the nuclear ‘bow wave’ for the Air Force would peak in 2027,” Air Force Lt. Gen. Richard Moore, Jr., Air Force deputy chief of staff for plans and programs, told the CSIS forum on Jan. 23. “We now see that that is slipping to the right, probably to 2028, maybe even 2029. At its peak, the nuclear modernization effort is about one-third of the investment portfolio of the Air Force. It’s not just two-thirds of the nuclear triad. It’s also 75 percent of the nuclear command and control that we have. It’s not just B-21 to make the air leg. It’s also the weapon that goes along with it. It’s not just Sentinel. It’s also a new re-entry vehicle and a new warhead that we’re working on. There is a lot going on in this portfolio, and, as they stack up on top of each other, it becomes a daunting task.”
“We had hoped to get that [bow wave] peak behind us before the things that we’re working on for research and development right now go into procurement–unlikely that that will be the case,” Moore said. “We will have to find the money [for Sentinel]. Sentinel is going to be funded. One way not to solve this is to think that we can just extend Minuteman III.”