If all goes according to plan, 400 new, deadly and nuclear-tipped LGM-35A Sentinel missiles will be lowered into refurbished silos scattered across western Nebraska and four other states beginning in 2029.
They will replace a similar number of now-outmoded Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles that have been poised in those same silos for the past 50 years.
Their job: to prevent a nuclear attack by assuring that Russia, or any other nuclear-armed foe, is utterly annihilated should it launch a first strike against the United States or its allies.
Now the deployment of the new Sentinels is threatened by cost overruns. In January, the U.S. Air Force notified Congress that the projected cost of the Sentinel program had jumped by 37%, from an estimated $95.8 billion in 2020, to about $130 billion.
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Deployment of the missiles, originally slated to begin in 2029, could also be pushed back by two years.
KIMBALL — Around 50 residents and law enforcement officials in the Kimball area gathered for a presentation on the role community members can …
“It was disturbing to hear about the (Sentinel) ICBMs,” said Rep. Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, in an interview. “The (Minuteman) ICBMs are 50 years old. The Air Force has to get this right.”
Nebraska plays a central role in the U.S. nuclear enterprise. U.S. Strategic Command, which deploys and maintains the atomic arsenal, is headquartered at Offutt Air Force Base. And 82 of 450 Minuteman silos are in the state’s far western countries, near Scottsbluff and Sidney. The rest are in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and North Dakota.
Gen. Anthony Cotton, StratCom’s commander, has repeated the warnings of his predecessors that the country must speed up nuclear modernization because of the rapid strides of America’s competitors. He said Russia has nearly completed the updating of its own Cold War-era arsenal, and China is rapidly expanding its nuclear capabilities.
“Our competitors are improving their position against the United States and its allies ... at rates that are far exceeding the pace we’ve seen just a few years ago,” Cotton said in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Feb. 29. “It is absolutely critical we continue at speed with the modernization of our nuclear triad.”
A plan to modernize missile systems; warnings the plan is ‘not on track’
Nearly all of StratCom’s weapons — including Ohio-class ballistic-missile submarines, B-52 and B-2 strategic bombers, and B-61 and B-83 gravity bombs — are 30 to 60 years old, well beyond their intended lifespan.
“Everything we’re trying to replace is a generation past when it should have been replaced,” said retired Maj. Gen. Rick Evans, a former acting deputy commander at StratCom who now heads the University of Nebraska’s National Strategic Research Institute. “When we got to the next generation — well, we won the Cold War. We chose to cash the ‘peace dividend.’”
Congress struck a bipartisan deal with then-president Barack Obama in 2010 to modernize the outdated weapons systems and ratify the New START arms-reduction treaty with Russia.
Urged on by successive StratCom leaders and other top military officials, successive Congresses have largely stuck to that blueprint for rebuilding the arsenal, even through lean budget times. So far, defense contractors are still on track to field the next-generation B-21 strategic bomber and the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine by the early 2030s.
In 2020, the Air Force awarded a $13.3 billion contract to Northrop Grumman to develop a replacement for the Minuteman III missiles, which have comprised the land-based leg of the U.S. nuclear arsenal since 1970.
Nebraska lawmakers took a step Tuesday toward protecting the missile silos in western Nebraska from potential enemy agents.
The Sentinel missiles will be tipped with W87-1 thermonuclear warheads, which are currently being developed under a separate contract.
The price tag for the Sentinel includes upgrading the silos, missile-control centers and other missile-field infrastructure. Cotton described the program as a “megaproject,” including the construction of 400 new launch facilities, thousands of miles of fiber-optic networks, and 7,500 miles of utility corridors to connect the launch sites with the three missile wing headquarters.
“It’s going to be huge out in western Nebraska. Thousands of jobs,” Bacon said.
The Air Force said in a statement that the bulk of the overrun is in the construction of that ground-based infrastructure. A report last June by the Government Accountability Office said the program has been hampered by supply chain disruptions and staffing shortages, in part because of delays in processing security clearances for workers on the program.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, similar staff shortages, inflation and supply chain problems have plagued both private and publicly funded construction projects — including notably, the $1 billion reconstruction of Offutt after the 2019 flood.
The GAO report also said the Sentinel missile is so cutting-edge, the Air Force is having to develop the technology as it begins to build the missile.
“The Air Force’s aggressive schedule meant they were relying on immature technology,” said U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., during the Feb. 29 committee hearing. “Even before this latest cost breach, there were bright blinking warnings that this program was not on track.”
To complicate things further, Evans said, most of the work is being done far from major metropolitan areas, where workers are more readily available.
“Is there housing, food, workforce to put in a small town in western Nebraska?” he asked. “I’m not surprised they have a cost crunch.”
Lt. general’s pledge: ‘Sentinel will be funded’
The formal notification two months ago was triggered by the 1983 Nunn-McCurdy Act, which requires the Pentagon to inform Congress if overruns exceed baseline cost projections. An overrun of 15% is classified as “significant” and of 30% is deemed “critical.”
A “critical” cost breach automatically triggers a Defense Department review, with a presumption that the program will be terminated. The missile program falls into the “critical” category.
To stop Sentinel’s demise, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin will have to show that the missile is essential to national security, that there is no cheaper alternative and that its priority is higher than other programs that would have to be trimmed to fund it. He must show that a management structure is in place to keep costs from getting further out of hand.
The Air Force has already said the program must continue.
“Sentinel will be funded. We’ll make the trades that it takes to make that happen,” said Lt. Gen. Richard Moore, deputy chief of staff for plans and programs, at a January event in Washington, D.C., according to the news outlet Defense One.
Some arms-control advocates have called for extending the life of the Minuteman III. They have challenged the Air Force’s studies asserting that building brand-new missiles actually costs less than refurbishing the old ones.
“The assumptions that led to this assessment ... were flawed and potentially skewed to favor a full replacement of the ICBM program,” said Mackenzie Knight, a fellow with the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project, in an analysis last month on the arms-control group’s website.
But the Air Force and its boosters say the missiles are just too old for another life-extension.
“We’ve hit the lifespan of the Minuteman III,” Evans said. “We have to keep pushing forward on (the Sentinel) ... There is no alternative, other than proceeding.”
In an op-ed penned for the Wall Street Journal earlier this year, U.S. Sens. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., and Roger Wicker, R-Miss. — both members of the Senate Armed Services Committee — said that updating the arsenal is “non-negotiable.”
“(A)bandoning or downsizing Sentinel isn’t an option,” Fischer and Wicker said. “Our nation’s safety and prosperity depend on an updated and fully operational nuclear deterrent.”