Nuclear modernization, including the Northrop Grumman LGM-35A Sentinel future intercontinental ballistic missile, and space resilience are top Department of the Air Force challenges that Matthew Lohmeier, the nominee for undersecretary of the Air Force, said he plans to address.
“If confirmed, I suspect that the modernization of the nuclear portfolio and ensuring the resilience of our space-based architecture will be the most pressing challenges,” Lohmeier wrote in response to advance policy questions from the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) before his Thursday confirmation hearing.
“If confirmed in this role, I believe that my greatest contribution will be on communicating that nuclear modernization is not an option,” Lohmeier continued. “It is the very foundation of our national security strategy—and we must get it right.”
The Air Force is restructuring Sentinel to reduce program costs.
On Jan. 18 2024, the service said it notified Congress that Sentinel had breached Nunn-McCurdy guidelines, primarily due to construction design changes, and then DoD acquisition chief William LaPlante ordered a root-cause analysis. The latter led last summer to the DoD decision to continue the program, due to its stated importance to strategic deterrence, but also to the rescinding of the Sentinel Milestone B engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) go-ahead from 2020.
Last summer, the Air Force pegged Sentinel cost at $140.9 billion, 81 percent higher than the September 2020 estimate when the program was approved for EMD–a rise that DoD said has less to do with the missile than the command-and-control segment, including silos, launch centers, “and the process, duration, staffing, and facilities to execute the conversion from Minuteman III to Sentinel.”
This article was first published in Exchange Monitor affiliate Defense Daily.
