The Air Force has to dig new silos for its Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile program, instead of reusing Minuteman III silos as originally planned, according to the service.
“The Air Force continues to assess its options and design concepts as part of doing good systems engineering. While no decision has been made, we expect Sentinel to use predominantly [Air Force]-owned real estate to build new missile silos instead of re-using MMIII silos,” a service spokesperson said in a statement Monday.
This shift means the service might have to construct hundreds of new silos, since the Sentinel program is intended to replace 400 aging Minuteman III missiles—spread across missile fields in Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming—on a one-for-one basis. Defense Daily first reported the service would need to build new silos, citing Air Force revelations at town hall discussions in some of those states.
The entire Sentinel program is being restructured after cost projections put the effort at nearly $141 billion, breaching the Nunn-McCurdy Act threshold. Pentagon officials have pointed to infrastructure and complex launch facilities as the main drivers of cost growth, not the missile itself. But while the Pentagon is pausing some work on Sentinel as it restructures the effort, officials remain adamant that the program must continue.
The decision to build new silos follows a test launch facility conversion project at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California that “validated the implications of unknown site conditions with significant cost and schedule growth,” according to the Air Force.
“As the program continues to undergo restructuring activities, the Air Force analysis continues to confirm unacceptable risks to cost, schedule, and weapon system performance stemming from the original baseline strategy of converting Minuteman III silos,” the spokesperson said.
When the requirements were first devised for Sentinel 10 years ago, the service believed it would be more cost-effective and efficient to reuse missile holes, but “shockingly enough, if we look at it 1746494065, that may not be the answer,” Air Force Global Strike commander Gen. Thomas Bussiere said on April 30, Breaking Defense reported.
The decision to build new silos instead of reusing old ones reflects mismanagement and flaws in the program’s early predications and planning, according to Mackenzie Knight, a senior research associate for the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. Knight also blamed Northrop Grumman, the sole-source contractor for the program, for underestimating the difficulty of converting Minuteman silos to Sentinel silos.
“I would say, at best it comes down to mismanagement and incompetence, and at worst, an intentional effort to downplay the complexities and challenges of the Sentinel program to make it appear like it would be the cheaper, easier option over just extending the service life of the current force,” Knight said.
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