The Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategic Deterrence and Nuclear Integration, Lt. Gen. Andrew Gebara,said on a Wednesday webinar that the first Sentinel flight test would be “well prior to” 2028.
A Government Accountability Office report earlier this year estimated that the first flight test for the Northrop Grumman-made intercontinental ballistic missile Sentinel would be delayed to 2028, instead of its original 2026 projection.
“I think we’re going to start testing well prior to that [2028],” Gebara said in answer to a question. “But I will defer to the program office on specifics. I think that we are doing a good job in our restructure of when and what are we trying to get out of each specific test.”
When asked by a reporter, Gebara said he is not worried about the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) rate of production for plutonium pits. The pits would make up the reactive core of the W87-1 to top the Sentinel. Referencing a review summoned by the deputy secretary of energy on pits in a story broken by the Exchange Monitor. Gebara replied he does “not currently have any concerns with their ability to do that.”
“There is a gargantan effort going on in the Department of Energy to get to capability going, we have very close interactions with the NNSA,” Gebara said. “We constantly talk about schedules there.”
Gebara added that he was at Savannah River Site, the eventual second site for pit production, “just a couple of weeks ago,” and at Los Alamos National Laboratory earlier in the summer. At both places, he had “in depth discussions on how they’re doing on plutonium pits, and I feel like, currently we’re on path” to successful pit production.
He added that pit production is not a “critical path,” meaning it is a program that has more flexibility, for the nation’s nuclear capabilities.
Sentinel will eventually replace the Boeing-made Minuteman III as the Air Force’s silo-based, nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile sometime in the 2030s while the Minuteman III is still commissioned. The last Minuteman III was originally expected to be decommissioned by the mid-2030s, but would now be decommissioned by at least 2050.
Meanwhile, John Evans, principal assistant deputy administrator for stockpile management at NNSA, told the Monitor in January that within the next year “one, perhaps both” of the W87 missiles — the W87-0 which is already in the stockpile and would fly first on the Sentinel, and the W87-1 that would fly next — would do a test flight on a non-Sentinel missile.