The Pentagon is looking at competition in the software and support construction realms for the Northrop Grumman future LGM-35A Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), a top official said last week.
The Air Force has been restructuring the program since July 2024 and expects Pentagon acquisition chief Michael Duffey to re-certify Sentinel for engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) this year – months ahead of the Air Force’s earlier estimate of early to mid-2027.
“As I came upon the program and did the research understanding the contract structures, one of the things I recognized was we had this very vertical structure, and what we’ve done is built an architecture in the restructure to find opportunity, specifically as it relates to construction and areas where, after we get design complete, we can open the aperture to have competition,” Air Force Gen. Dale White, the direct reporting portfolio manager for critical major weapon systems, told a House Armed Services Committee strategic forces panel hearing.
The Northrop Grumman-made Sentinel ICBM will eventually replace the Boeing-made Minuteman III as the Air Force’s silo-based, nuclear-armed ICBM. That is expected sometime in the 2030s while the Minuteman III is still commissioned. The new missile will initially carry W87-0 warheads provided by the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, before transitioning to the W87-1 warheads being made at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
“One of the other areas I’m paying very close attention to is making sure we build a software architecture that allows us to have an opportunity to be able to compete into the future rather than typically what we do is have software that is very stove-piped, in a sense,” White continued. “Northrop Grumman is working with us on that, building that architecture and making sure it is open. If that architecture remains open, it allows us to continuously compete the systems and subsystems.”
White was responding to a question from Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), the subcommittee’s ranking member, on how he was ensuring that the structure of the Sentinel program would encourage “maximum competition” as “one of the best ways” to “force contractors to get down their costs.”