As the Air Force restructures the program for the future intercontinental ballistic missile, it wants to solidify requirements for the missile silos and launch centers before possibly recertifying the program for engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) in 2027.
In an interview, run by Exchange Monitor affiliate Defense Daily in September at the Air and Space Forces Association’s annual Air, Space & Cyber conference, Air Force Brig. Gen. William Rogers, the program executive officer for intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), suggested the Air Force lacks a detailed knowledge of such requirements.
“Previously, based on the need for speed, we kinda took the risk and said, ‘We’re gonna derive the requirements to this level, but go forward and start designing the silo and the launch center,” Rogers said. “It didn’t work the way we had hoped so now we have to go back under the restructure and really make sure those requirements are locked in.”
All the LGM-35A Sentinel silos are to be new rather than refurbished, 1960s-era Minuteman silos as the Air Force had planned. The new silos are required, in part, because of the larger Northrop Grumman Sentinel, but also because of environmental conditions in the Minuteman silos, including asbestos, lead paint, and tilting in a small number of silos due to variations in their concrete thickness.
This year, the Air Force used a former ICBM silo, Launch Facility 04, at Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif., to inform its analysis and conclusion on the need for new silos for Sentinel. The service has also received data from a mock Minuteman III silo built in 2021 by Northrop Grumman in Promontory, Utah.
In addition to the new silos and launch centers, the Air Force has planned to start laying 5,000 miles of fiber optic cable in 2027 to replace Minuteman III’s copper-wired Hardened Intersite Cable System.
“The [Army] Corps of Engineers is working the detailed design,” Rogers said of the fiber optic cable. “I think they’ve put the bid out just recently for that work. They’re working the bid process now with industry. At F.E. Warren, we took that work away from Northrop Grumman, and we put the Corps of Engineers in charge of leading that effort with the goal of using more access to the telecommunications industry that do this every day.”
The Pentagon notified Congress in January last year of a critical Nunn-McCurdy breach on Sentinel, and that July DoD rescinded its September, 2020 decision to allow EMD to proceed. The EMD repeal was to allow an 18 to 24-month program restructuring, as a DoD analysis indicated that Sentinel was a necessary deterrent and that a redone Minuteman III Stage 1 booster would field later than Sentinel.
After DoD’s walking back of EMD, the Air Force paused silo and launch center infrastructure work but allowed work on the missile, including its command and launch systems, and the wing command centers to go forward.
DoD’s cost estimate for Sentinel is $140.9 billion, 81% higher than when the program entered EMD in September 2020.
The Air Force said that Northrop Grumman recently re-started concept design work on the silos and launch centers.
Initial operational capability for Sentinel was May 2029, but that has shifted to the end of 2033. The 659 Sentinel missiles–including 25 for test–are to replace 450 Boeing Minuteman IIIs–400 deployed and 50 reserve–fielded in the 1970s. The Air Force will likely have a mixed fleet of Sentinel missiles and Minuteman IIIs initially.
Air Force options include sustaining Minuteman III until 2050, but Rogers said the service is considering removing the final Minuteman III well before that date. The Air Force is not planning to fund a service life extension program for Minuteman III, but instead to “mitigate obsolescence issues” with the ICBM, he said.
Regarding the mixed fleet of Minuteman IIIs and Sentinels, Rogers said that “we are thinking through how would we logically decommission parts of Minuteman III, as we stand up Sentinel.”
“It could be site by site, but more likely we’re probably going to look at blocks, where it will make sense so we take those off the network for Minuteman III, but at the same time we’re doing it in blocks standing up Sentinel in a smart way so those are important things we’re working through in our planning,” Rogers said.
The Air Force had assumed in 2013 and 2014, based on high cost estimates for new silos, that it would re-use Minuteman III silos for the future ICBM, but those estimates have come down due to better technologies, Rogers said. In addition, the service found that “some of the ‘as builts’ weren’t as accurate, given they were done in the 1960s,” he said. “There was more asbestos and some different things at each of the silos, such as unexpected variations in the concrete.”
An “as built” is a record of the state of final construction of a site.
Rogers said that the Air Force re-examined the business case for refurbished Minuteman III silos, including the new estimates for asbestos and lead paint remediation.
“The business case was actually better in terms of cost and schedule for just rebuilding new [Sentinel silos] on the same site,” Rogers said.
A new Sentinel silo “also mitigates some risk in terms of the air vehicle itself because the one thing the [Minuteman III silo] reuse assumption did is maybe contain our appetite on the size of the air vehicle,” according to Rogers. “While I think we could use that [Minuteman III] silo size, there is some technical risk in the pressure as it [Sentinel] leaves the silo. So, while we have the opportunity, we could do other things like mitigate the risk. While the [Sentinel] rocket is larger, it’s not that much bigger than Minuteman III, and it would also allow us to potentially give more space [in the silo] for our maintainers of the system.”
Between March and May, Air Force Global Strike Command at Barksdale AFB, La. established four Sentinel Site Activation Task Forces (SATAFs.)–Detachment 9 under Lt. Col. Suzanne Lamar at Vandenberg, Detachment 10 under retired Air Force Col. Stephen Kravitsky at F.E. Warren AFB, Wyo., Detachment 11 under Lt. Col. John Mayer at Malmstrom AFB, Mont., and Detachment 12 under Lt. Col. Nicholas Conover at Minot AFB, N.D.
“SATAFs were initiated by Gen. Curtis LeMay, Air Force Vice Chief of Staff, during the construction of missile fields in 1960 to better manage the challenges revealed from activating ICBM sites across the entire enterprise,” according to the 90th Missile Wing at F.E. Warren. “Installing SATAF commanders at each ICBM installation drastically improved the ICBM site activation process for Atlas, Titan, and Minuteman sites, and it is intended to do the same for Sentinel.”
Kravitsky commanded the 90th Missile Wing between 2015 and 2017, served as the deputy director of logistics at F.E. Warren between 2019 and 2022, and then worked as a director of business development at Northrop Grumman, according to his LinkedIn bio.
“Despite the delays stemming from the Sentinel restructuring, [Air Force] Global Strike Command has already taken some actions to prepare for the transition,” according to a GAO report last month, ICBM Modernization: Air Force Actions Needed to Expeditiously Address Critical Risks to Sentinel Transition (GAO-25-108466). “The Air Force has shifted the locations of non-deployed launch facilities from an equal distribution across all three missile wings, to a majority distribution at the 90th Missile Wing at F.E. Warren Air Force Base.”
In April, AFGSC said it transferred Minuteman III Launch Facility (LF) 5E10 at F.E. Warren to SATAF Detachment 10 for de-certification–a decommissioning that is to help sustain the remaining silos.
The Air Force removed Minuteman IIIs from 50 silos between 2014 and July 2017, but the service says it has kept those silos in “warm” status for future use. With the decommissioning of LF 5E10, the service now has 449 Minuteman III silos. The Air Force plans to have 24 Sentinel command and control launch centers–eight at each missile wing–to replace the 45 Minuteman III Missile Alert Facilities.
Exchange Monitor affiliate Defense Daily first published this story.