Northrop Grumman “successfully conducted its first major design review” for the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent engineering and manufacturing development baseline last November, the company announced this week.
Northrop touted the milestone as the new Joe Biden administration prepares its first federal budget request and Congress continues its work confirming Biden’s nominees to top Pentagon posts. A Northrop spokesman did not return an email by deadline about why the company had not announced the completion of the review when it happened in November.
“The next key milestone is the integrated baseline review,” Northrop Grumman said in its press release. The review that wrapped in November “is an assessment of the current technical baseline, which includes user requirements, program data and configuration elements, and is the first step in transitioning ownership of the allocated baseline to the government. The three-day event was held virtually with more than 100 people in attendance throughout Northrop Grumman and the U.S. Air Force.”
The next review on the slate for the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) team is the integrated baseline review, “which sets the program’s performance measurement baseline,” Northrop said in the statement.
Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has said the Department of Defense could cut GBSD numbers and extend the service life of the Minuteman III while maintaining nuclear deterrence and redirecting the savings into conventional defense programs.
Current plans call for replacing the 400 deployed Minuteman III ICBMs with GBSDs, plus another 259 GBSDs for spares and testing. Acquisition costs will be at least $95 billion, while total life cycle costs could reach $264 billion, according to government estimates.
GBSD defenders contend that the land-based missiles are a useful way of confounding a nuclear-armed adversary’s incentive to launch a massive nuclear assault on the U.S. homeland and say that it would be as expensive or more expensive to upgrade every single Minuteman III missile as it would be to continue with GBSD as planned.
GBSD is scheduled to go into service around 2030 and initially will use W87-0 warheads provided by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. The 87-0 will be a Minuteman III warhead adapted for use on GBSD. Flight certification for the GBSD variant could start in the next several years, the Air Force has said.
Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks told senators during her confirmation hearing this month that she supports the nuclear triad but is worried about its readiness and that a review of such readiness would be one of her highest, immediate priorities.
This story first appeared in Weapons Complex Morning Briefing affiliate publication Defense Daily.
