Air Force going ‘line by line’ to bring down nuclear missile costs

The U.S. Air Force “underestimated” the complexity of building a sprawling network of launch centers and other ground infrastructure for its next nuclear missile, which led to severe projected cost overruns, the service’s acquisition chief said Wednesday.

Most of the Air Force’s and industry’s attention was initially focused on the missile portion of the LGM-35A Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile, and the program “really neglected the complexity of the ground infrastructure,” Andrew Hunter, the Air Force’s assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, said at the Defense News Conference in Arlington, Virginia, on Wednesday.

The Air Force wants to replace its arsenal of roughly 450 aging Minuteman III nuclear missiles, which are nearing the end of its life, with the Northrop Grumman-made Sentinel. But the projected future costs of Sentinel’s infrastructure — which include building new launch control centers across the Plains region, refurbishing existing silos for the new missiles and replacing about 7,500 miles of copper cable connecting the facilities with modern fiber optics — have skyrocketed.

The Pentagon originally expected to spend $77.7 billion on Sentinel, but the program is now likely to cost about $160 billion if it stays on its current course. The projected cost overruns alarmed lawmakers and Pentagon officials and incurred a process known as a critical Nunn-McCurdy breach.

After a review announced in July, the military decided Sentinel was too important to cancel but must be restructured to bring those costs back down. But the Pentagon said even a “reasonably modified” version would still probably cost $140.9 billion, or 81% more than the original estimate.

The Air Force is now going “line by line” through Sentinel’s requirements to look for places to bring its costs down, Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Jim Slife said, and the “exhaustive” process will take months.

“The undersecretary (Melissa Dalton), Mr. Hunter’s team and I are deeply, deeply involved in looking at our requirements (and) making sure that we revalidate all the requirements,” Slife said. The Air Force needs to “trace every single one of them back to either presidential guidance, or departmental guidance for things like safety, security, surety, survivability — all the things that you would want in a system that you’re going to rely on to keep the nation safe,” Slife said.

Finding places to cut costs is challenging, Slife said. Sentinel’s top-level requirements — the big-picture blueprint of what it needs to do — were fairly straightforward, he said.

But the “derived requirements” that spell out how Sentinel will do its job “actually can become problematic,” he said. Those can include spelling out how many facilities will be needed to carry out Sentinel’s mission and how much concrete those facilities will need to build and how large a workforce they will require, Slife said.

The Air Force has not built a new ICBM and accompanying infrastructure since the Minuteman III, which was deployed in the early 1970s.

And because it has been so long since the Air Force undertook a major acquisition of this scale, Hunter said, the Air Force underestimated Sentinel’s complexity.

“We’re having to relearn some of those skills and up our game,” Hunter said.

That “striking” complexity of Sentinel’s ground infrastructure is crucial to making the ICBM system an effective nuclear deterrent, Hunter said.

“We have to have a missile where we can respond instantly, at all times, without fail, and in the context of the highest of high-intensity conflicts, a potential nuclear exchange,” Hunter said. “And we ask our ground infrastructure to provide most of those capabilities. The missile is only a small piece of that puzzle.”

The Air Force also has to “bring a lot more engineering focus on the ground infrastructure” to simplify Sentinel and bring its costs under control, Hunter said.