In a series of executive orders released Wednesday, President Donald Trump said any major defense acquisition program 15% over cost could be cancelled.
“[A]ny program more than 15 percent behind schedule based on the current Acquisition Program Baseline (APB), 15 percent over cost based on the current APB, unable to meet any key performance parameters, or unaligned with the Secretary of Defense’s mission priorities, will be considered for potential cancellation,” the order said. “The Secretary of Defense shall submit the potential cancellation list to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for future budget determinations.”
That could include Sentinel, the Air Force’s Northrop Grumman-made intercontinental ballistic missile that would replace Minuteman III as the land leg of the nuclear triad. Sentinel breached a threshold of 25% over baseline cost projections in January 2024, triggering a mandatory report to Congress under a law known as Nunn-McCurdy.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has 90 days, or until early July, to complete a comprehensive cost review of all major defense acquisition programs.
In July 2024, the Air Force said Sentinel’s costs have soared even more since the service announced the Nunn-McCurdy breach, clocking in now at about $140.9 billion, or 81% higher than the program’s first Milestone B estimate.
The Air Force had targeted May 2029 for initial operational capability for Sentinel, but that could slip several years, the service has said.
Pentagon acquisition boss William LaPlante, who led the Nunn-McCurdy program review, said that DoD will scale down the Sentinel launch facilities and make them less complex to aid the transition from Boeing‘s Minuteman III to Sentinel. The new missile will initially carry W87-0 warheads provided by the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
Later Sentinels will use W87-1 warheads, a replacement warhead for the W78 now used on Minuteman III. W87-1 warheads will also include freshly-cast plutonium pits, fissile first stage nuclear weapon cores, from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
