The U.S. military has received permission after a four-month review process to move ahead with its program to build new intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), despite repeated cost overruns.
The Sentinel ICBM program seeks to replace the U.S. Air Force’s existing fleet of Minuteman III nuclear missiles.
The cost overrun was high enough to trigger a budgetary oversight measure known as a Nunn–McCurdy review.
By statute, programs estimated to breach the Nunn–McCurdy threshold are to be terminated unless the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment determines that the program meets key criteria.
Those criteria are that the program is vital to national security, there are no sufficient alternatives, the Pentagon’s cost assessment and program evaluation (CAPE) director concludes that the cost increases are reasonable, the program is more important than others that stand to lose funding because of the cost overruns, and that there are sufficient measures to control future cost increases.
Defense Acquisition and Sustainment Undersecretary William LaPlante announced on July 8 that his review team had weighed the Sentinel program’s fate over the past 120 days and determined that it could continue.
‘We Fully Appreciate the Magnitude’
The Sentinel program is moving ahead with a revised cost of about $140.9 billion, once accounting for expected program modifications.“There are reasons for this cost growth, but there are also no excuses,” Mr. LaPlante said. “We fully appreciate the magnitude of the cost, but we also understand the risks of not modernizing our nuclear forces and of not addressing the very real threats we confront.”
Mr. LaPlante said he had instructed the Air Force to restructure the program to meet the revised goals.
Along with this restructuring, the Pentagon undersecretary rescinded the “Milestone B” authorization that the Pentagon had given the Sentinel program in September 2020. Milestone B represents the engineering and manufacturing development stage.
Mr. LaPlante said maintaining the Sentinel program’s schedule will be a key consideration as the Air Force restructures, while he also noted that the ICBM replacement effort is already looking at a delay of “several years.”
The Air Force currently retains an arsenal of about 400 Minuteman III ICBMs, making up the land component of the U.S. nuclear triad. The Minuteman I missiles first entered service in the 1960s and have seen periodic modernization, with the third iteration of the ICBM series entering service in 1970. Production for the Minuteman IIIs ended in 1978.
The nuclear triad refers to a three-pronged structure of the land-based ICBMs, a sea force of submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and strategic bombers with nuclear warheads by air.
The U.S. military also is seeking to revamp the air- and sea-based components of the triad with the new B-21 Raider stealth bombers and Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines.
