Air Force to trim fat from ballooning Sentinel missile program

January 26, 2024
By Exchange Monitor

The Air Force is examining how to reduce the massive civil works project costs that make up a significant part of the Northrop Grumman LGM-35A Sentinel future ICBM program, service officials said Wednesday.

The service last week informed Congress of a 37% unit cost Nunn-McCurdy program breach — an increase in unit cost per missile to $162 million from $118 million in 2020. The total program cost is now more than $125 billion compared with 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.”

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, [and the] military construction supply chain,” Jones said. 

“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,” Jones said. “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.”

“We have predicted that the nuclear ‘bow wave’ for the Air Force would peak in 2027,” Air Force Lt. Gen. Richard Moore, 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,” said Moore. 

Sentinel will deploy with W87-0 warheads, weapons taken from the existing Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile fleet and adapted for use with Sentinel. 

Later Sentinel missiles will use the W87-1 warhead, a newly manufactured copy of W78 [grr sic], Minuteman III’s other warhead, but with a freshly cast pit from an under-construction factory at the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Owing to delays with the pit program, Congress told the Air Force to look at using existing W78 warheads on a single Sentinel wing.