Rich Abott
Defense Daily
Building a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) will be cheaper than upgrading the 1970s-era Minuteman III, a Boeing official said on Wednesday.
Frank McCall, Boeing vice president for strategic deterrence systems, said affordability is just one of several reasons why the Air Force’s Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) plan to replace the Minuteman III is a good idea and why Boeing believes it has a good shot at winning the contract.
The GBSD is one of two Air Force nuclear weapons delivery vehicle programs the service is working on, the other being the Long-Range Standoff (LRSO) cruise missile, meant to replace the Air Launched Cruise Missile (ALCM). The GBSD is planned to be deployed by the late 2020s and serve through 2075.
The cost of extending the Minuteman III’s life again is roughly equivalent to replacing the whole system, McCall told reporters at a media briefing. He named costs like how solid propellants age out with a limited shelf life and the expense and difficulty in recreating old technologies. Although some guidance and propulsion components date “only” to 1993, a contractor would still have to remanufacture old devices like an electro-mechanical code device built in 1961, he said.
The first Minuteman was developed in 1958 and Boeing has maintained the Minuteman III since 1970 even as it has gone through several phases of upgrades, updates, and modifications. McCall noted Minuteman III originally had a 10-year service life that has exceeded expectations. A recent test launch of a Minuteman III from Vandenberg Air Force Base is a “testament to the reliability, durability, and effectiveness of those systems.”
Boeing is arguing that if their Minuteman III, which was not designed to serve this long, can serve through the 2020s, then they are well-positioned to develop a new ICBM that from the start is meant to serve into the 2070s.
McCall also spoke about how the world is changing and U.S. threats are evolving so the Defense Department needs a more capable system. The Minuteman force was built to be aimed at the Soviet Union by travelling over the North Pole, but now potential adversaries are more dispersed with greater missile defense capability, he said. When the Minuteman III was first deployed the only missile defenses were armed with nuclear warheads that would detonate over one’s own territory, not the more accurate kinetic impact types being developed today.
Building a new system also allows the Air Force to use this opportunity to build greater affordability and capability into the GBSD over time. McCall highlighted the new GBSD will be built to last decades and is being designed to accommodate the “evolution of the threat” with a margin beyond current strategic threats to the U.S. This will be achieved through modularity to accommodate systems not yet designed in an open architecture setting, he said.
This also means the GBSD would be capable of accommodating new re-entry vehicles for the nuclear weapon delivery system in the future, McCall acknowledged. Generally, the missile interfaces are planned to be as standard and open as possible.
McCall said some of the costs are already known because the GBSD will keep using the hardened Minuteman silos in the Great Plains states. He was unwilling to get into the specifics of tradeoffs in the GBSD on payload weight and capability versus range but noted that kind of constraint exists for it. However, McCall compared the GBSD to the significantly larger Peacekeeper ICBM from the late Cold War era which still used the same ICBM launch facilities. So GBSD will still have “substantial space” to increase capability even given silo space constraints, he said.
McCall said Boeing expects to get through the GBSD competition downselect, set for the 2020 timeframe. The Air Force downselect will be based on the testing of components, the preliminary design review details, and proposals about the future program design like how competitors intend to complete development of the GBSD and get to Low Rate Initial Production.
He said each company is making a range of prototypes meant to mitigate development risk and validate integrated weapon designs. However, unlike the 1960s, the competitors do not need to reinvent the basic technology that makes an ICBM work, they just need to use current technology for a substantial, broad system.
The Air Force’s baseline requirements for the missile will be in one or three warhead-reentry vehicle options just like the Minuteman III now has. Currently all U.S. Minuteman III missiles are configured for one warhead under New START treaty constraints, but are capable of carrying up to three.
The competition’s Technology Maturation & Risk Reduction (TMRR) phase of the acquisition does not currently include early missile progress like robust flight and ground test programs, he added. The TMRR here is fairly limited in scope, meant to validate the designs. Those activities largely happen through Engineering and Manufacturing Development and other development phases where the components are deployed in a test environment and run in increasingly operational ways.
Gen. Robin Rand, commander of the Air Force’s Global Strike Command, in May said he saw no indication of a delay in the acquisition process for the TMRR phases of the GBSD or LRSO programs.
The Air Force said it is seeking mature solutions for the GBSD from the start and McCall said they “do not see tremendous technology development requirements” for the system. All of the technology is available to the company so development is all about how to use it effectively and maintain the ICBM mission over the longest period of time at the lowest price.
The Air Force will make a determination later about what features they want to test as the acquisition program goes towards a flight test program. This will occur as the process goes through the critical design review, McCall said
The Boeing executive demurred when asked what the GBSD will do better than an upgraded Minuteman III or what Boeing does best in the competition due to classified and competitive issues, respectively. He only noted again how the threat to the U.S. is different now and the GBSD capability needs to evolve responsiveness to larger potential threat actors with more capabilities.
He was also unwilling to comment on Boeing’s GBSD launch control system design. It may launch hot directly from the silos like the Minuteman does or potentially use a cold launch like the Peacekeeper. A cold launch uses a pressurized space below the missile so upon launch it first pops out of the silo like a cork out of a bottle before burning fuel for the rest of the trip.
McCall said Boeing believes it has offered the Air Force a solid solution and think they can develop a system with the capability described by the service at low risk with existing technology. He highlighted Boeing has a long history with these kinds of missiles, having developed the original Minuteman and working on the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system in more recent years. The company understands what is necessary to bring systems like this to life and sustain them over time affordable, he said.
Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin have also confirmed bids for the GBSD contract. Northrop Grumman was the Air Force’s ICBM engineering and technical assistance contractor for decades while Lockheed Martin previously developed the service’s first-ever operational ICBM (the Atlas) and provides command and control systems for the Minuteman III.
The Air Force plans to award up to two contracts at the end of this fiscal year for both the GBSD and LRSO’s advanced development phases. The service requested $216 million for the GBSD in its FY 2018 budget request, up from the current $114 million.
