NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. – The ground support segment for the future LGM-35A intercontinental ballistic missile by Northrop Grumman “has really turned the corner,” U.S. Air Force Gen. Dale White, direct reporting portfolio manager for critical major weapon systems, told reporters here Monday.
The Pentagon may undertake a re-certification of Sentinel for engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) in December.
The Air Force is restructuring the Sentinel program after a critical Nunn-McCurdy cost breach in January 2024 led to a revocation of Sentinel’s 2020 EMD certification, and the Government Accountability Office’s recently-released annual weapon systems assessment said the program faces considerable uncertainty amid ongoing design maturation, the complexity of building missile infrastructure across multiple states, and supply chain and workforce challenges that could further affect cost and schedule.
“We stood up the infrastructure part of the program,” White said on Monday in a reporters roundtable at the Air & Space Forces Association’s annual conference. “We now have an Army Corps of Engineers commander for Joint Task Force-Castle that reports directly up to me and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers commander,” he said. “That allows us to really focus on making sure we get the infrastructure part of this program on track and making sure it does not become the thing that prevents us from succeeding.”
In the restructuring of Sentinel, “one of the first things we had to do is we had to bring the four-star level requirements owners together and have a hard conversation, and it started with the size of the launch control complexes,” White said on Monday. “Those were a lot of unknowns. We have since pretty much locked down the majority of the design to do that.”
“The requirements area, specifically as it relates to facilities and infrastructure, has really turned the corner,” White added.
Exchange Monitor affiliate Defense Daily first published a version of this story.