Latest news with #LGM-35ASentinel
Time of India
22-05-2025
- General
- Time of India
US conducts successful test launch of Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile
Minuteman III ICBM launch The United States Air Force (USAF) on Wednesday conducted a successful test launch of the nuclear-capable Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) which can deliver a nuclear warhead to anywhere on Earth. The missile was unarmed when launched at 12:01 am Pacific Time from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base, USAF said in a statement . "This ICBM test launch underscores the strength of the nation's nuclear deterrent and the readiness of the ICBM leg of the triad. This is part of routine and periodic activities designed to demonstrate that the United States' nuclear deterrent remains safe, secure, reliable and effective in deterring 21st-century threats and reassuring our allies," the statement quoted USAF's General Thomas Bussiere as saying. "With more than 300 similar tests conducted in the past, this test is part of the nation's ongoing commitment to maintaining a credible deterrent and is not a response to current world events," Bussiere added. As per the statement, the missile travelled 15,000 miles per hour to the United States Army's Space and Missile Defense Command's Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site in the Marshall Islands 4,200 miles away. The Marshall Islands are a sprawling chain of volcanic islands in the central Pacific Ocean, between America's Hawaii province and the Philippines in Asia. The Minuteman is a 1970-era program which the Air Force plans to replace with the LGM-35A Sentinel system. Minuteman III is to be used as a "viable deterrent" until LGM achieves full capability.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Sentinel nuclear missiles will need new silos, Air Force says
The Air Force will have to dig entirely new nuclear missile silos for the LGM-35A Sentinel, creating another complication for a troubled program that is already facing future cost and schedule overruns. The Air Force originally hoped the existing silos that have housed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles could be adapted to launch Sentinel missiles, which would be more efficient than digging entirely new silos. But a test project at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California showed that approach would be fraught with further problems and cause the program to run even further behind and over budget, the service said. 'As the [Sentinel] program continues to undergo restructuring activities, the Air Force analysis continues to confirm unacceptable risks to cost, schedule and weapon system performance stemming from the original baseline strategy of converting Minuteman III silos,' an Air Force spokesperson said in an email Tuesday. 'Additionally, we have data based on a test launch facility conversion project at Vandenberg Space Force Base that validated the implications of unknown site conditions with significant cost and schedule growth. 'To mitigate this and other risks, the Air Force plans to build new missile silos on predominantly Air Force-owned real estate, which means reusing the existing missile sites but not the 55-year-old silos,' the spokesperson continued. Sentinel is the Air Force's program to replace the existing Minuteman III ICBMs — the United States' land-based portion of its nuclear deterrent — which are more than half a century old and reaching the end of their lives. But Sentinel, which is being built by Northrop Grumman, will be a massive modernization, involving construction projects spread out across thousands of miles in the Great Plains region. It was originally expected to cost $77.7 billion, but projected future costs ran so severely over budget that in January 2024, it triggered a review process known as a critical Nunn-McCurdy breach. After that review, the Pentagon last year concluded Sentinel was too critical to national security to abandon, but ordered the Air Force to restructure it to bring its costs under control. And further studies of the program are showing more potential problems. In a briefing with reporters in March 2024, discussing the Nunn-McCurdy breach and the program's complications, a Northrop Grumman official acknowledged that further study of the conditions of the existing silos may force the program to dig new ones. 'There's currently no plan to dig new holes,' the official said. 'But given the site conditions of the land, [there is] certainly the potential that when they get to investigating more of the silos, they may find that [reusing] some of them might not be possible.' Gen. Thomas Bussiere, head of Air Force Global Strike Command, said in a virtual forum last week that the service is still studying the Sentinel program's structure and finding ways to improve it. 'Nunn-McCurdy was a very stressful process for the department,' Bussiere said in an April 30 virtual forum, hosted by the Advanced Nuclear Weapons Alliance Deterrence Center. 'But what it did is it gives us the opportunity to revisit and open up the aperture for how those facilities are being designed, and how those facilities are going to be implemented with the new capability.' After the review, Bussiere said, the Air Force began looking at ways to reuse the existing land with Minuteman silos, if not the silos themselves. The service is also looking at other land already owned by the federal government to supplement its ICBM sites, he said. But as the service transitions from the older analog command-and-control architecture to Sentinel's new, digital-era control functions, Bussiere said, it will have to ensure it maintains a minimum number of ICBMs on alert to preserve the nation's nuclear deterrent. And considering the scale of this project could surpass even the Eisenhower administration's construction of the interstate highway system, Bussiere said, that will be a complicated balance to strike. 'That's going to be a graceful ballet between [operations] and maintenance, acquisition, a bunch of partners that are part of this program, to make sure we get this right. Quite frankly, we've never done it before, at this scale and complexity.'
Asia Times
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Asia Times
The rotting, aging silos housing America's nukes
Crumbling missile silos are forcing a multibillion-dollar rethink of how, where and whether to base the next generation of US nuclear weapons. This month, multiple media outlets reported that the US Air Force now expects to construct predominantly new silos for the LGM-35A Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) system, abandoning plans to reuse 55-year-old Minuteman III silos after concluding that doing so poses unacceptable cost, schedule and performance risks. Initially seen as cost-effective when Sentinel launched a decade ago, silo reuse has proven unfeasible following a failed test conversion at Vandenberg Space Force Base and subsequent analyses under the Nunn-McCurdy Act cost breach review. In April, General Thomas Bussiere, commander of the US Air Force Global Strike Command, confirmed that reusing old silos would jeopardize affordability, timelines and technical feasibility. As a result, the Air Force will build new silos primarily on federally owned land within existing missile fields across the states of Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota and Wyoming. Developed by Northrop Grumman, Sentinel aims to replace 400 aging Minuteman III missiles, but its US$141 billion price tag—driven mainly by launch infrastructure—has delayed its debut beyond 2029. Critics, including the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), accuse the US Department of Defense (DOD) and its contractor of mismanagement and underestimating the program's complexity. Still, officials insist Sentinel is essential to preserving the nuclear triad and must proceed despite soaring costs and logistical obstacles. Time and Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reports describe near-daily breakdowns, water intrusion, misaligned doors, collapsed conduits and obsolete parts, some reportedly sourced from museums. Silo modernization now requires full reconstruction of command centers and thousands of kilometers of new fiber optics, those reports said. But infrastructure woes aren't the only factor driving debate—there's also disagreement over whether fixed ICBMs still belong in the triad. Steve Fetter and Kingston Reif argued in an October 2019 War on the Rocks piece that silo-based ICBMs act as a 'sponge' deterrent: with 450 silos spread across vast territory, an adversary would need to expend hundreds of warheads to disable them in a first strike. They also serve as a tripwire, guaranteeing retaliation if the US homeland is attacked, and provide a hedge against possible vulnerabilities in nuclear ballistic missile submarines (SSBN) and strategic bombers. However, they warned that fixed ICBMs must be launched within 30 minutes of an incoming strike, giving the president less than 10 minutes to decide, raising the risk of mistaken retaliation based on incomplete data. If submarines and bombers are already on alert and dispersed, they argued, they offer more than enough retaliatory capability, making silo-based missiles redundant in both survivability and flexibility. However, if an SSBN is destroyed, unable to launch or loses contact with command, its entire missile load is lost. Thomas Mahnken and Bryan Clark noted in a June 2020 The Strategist piece that with as few as one SSBN on patrol at a time, a single loss could cripple a third of the triad. Emerging sensor technologies could soon render oceans transparent, challenging the future viability of sea-based deterrents. Likewise with strategic bombers, Sidney Dean pointed out in a December 2022 article for European Security and Defense (ESD) that they rely on forward bases with fixed locations, making them and their infrastructure susceptible to preemptive attack. Dean noted that ICBMs can reach targets in under 30 minutes, while bombers may take hours to reach their weapon deployment zones, giving adversaries ample time to track, intercept or mount defenses. He added that bombers are vulnerable to enemy air defenses, interceptors and electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attacks. Given the mounting vulnerabilities of all triad legs—fixed, sea and air—combined with rising costs, the 2023 US Strategic Posture Report recommended that some ICBMs be deployed in a road-mobile configuration to mitigate silo limitations. In a January 2024 Heritage Foundation article, Robert Peters endorsed this approach, suggesting that road-mobile Sentinels on transporter erector launchers (TELs) would be difficult for adversaries to target. Peters suggested that in a crisis or for signaling, mobile ICBMs could operate on randomized, pre-approved routes, moving hundreds of kilometers daily, making them nearly impossible to target. He added that mobile ICBMs could head to launch sites to await further orders if an attack were detected, significantly enhancing survivability. Yet the mobile option introduces its risks. Brian Wish, writing in a Real Clear Defense article, warned that mobile ICBMs are more vulnerable to terrorist attacks, politically controversial if deployed on public roads and logistically difficult to keep on constant alert. He argued that they should only supplement—not replace—a hardened, dispersed single-warhead silo-based arsenal, which he views as the most stable configuration for nuclear deterrence.
Yahoo
27-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Air Force secretary nominee pledges to focus on nuclear modernization
The nominee to be the Department of the Air Force's next secretary pledged on Thursday to focus on its nuclear modernization efforts and continue work to get its troubled intercontinental ballistic missile program back on track. In his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Troy Meink, who previously served as the deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office, also told lawmakers the department needs to act faster to innovate its weapon systems and streamline its acquisition systems. The Air Force is working on replacing its arsenal of about 450 50-year-old Minuteman III nuclear missiles — the land-based portion of the nation's nuclear triad — with a new Northrop Grumman-made ICBM called the LGM-35A Sentinel. But Sentinel's projected future costs increased dramatically from what Northrop and the Air Force originally expected, triggering a cost overrun process called a critical Nunn-McCurdy breach. The Air Force launched a review of the program to find ways to bring its costs down, which concluded Sentinel is essential and cannot be canceled. Meink told lawmakers that if confirmed, he planned to review the results of the Sentinel Nunn McCurdy breach study. He also intends to continue overseeing the B-21 Raider stealth bomber program, which will be a key portion of the nation's air-based segment of the nuclear triad. Michael Duffey, the administration's nominee for undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, called nuclear modernization the 'backbone' of the nation's strategic deterrent in Thursday's hearing. 'Ensuring that we have a modern, capable nuclear enterprise that not only includes the B-21 — which is a successful acquisition program, by all accounts — but the Columbia-class submarine and the Sentinel nuclear ICBM are critical,' Duffey said, referring to the U.S. Navy's next-generation nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine. He pledged to work with the National Nuclear Security Administration and lawmakers to ensure the nation keeps high-quality systems needed for the safe and secure use of nuclear weapons. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, raised concerns that the Air Force won't have the budget necessary to carry out its conventional missions while also being on the hook to fund two simultaneous nuclear modernizations. Meink said the Air Force is now in a historically unique situation as it is conducting modernization programs across all of its core mission areas, including the nuclear upgrades. 'Those systems are pretty expensive,' Meink said. If confirmed, Meink said, one of his first priorities will be to review all the service's modernization efforts and readiness needs and see what additional resources it might need to pay for those. Meink plans to come back to Congress with that information to further discuss what needs to be done. Cotton also pressed Meink on the service's longstanding pilot shortage, which he said is now about 1,800 pilots. Meink — who served in the Air Force as a KC-135 Stratotanker navigator — promised to look at how to fix that years-long problem. The solution is not just a matter of raising pilots' pay, he said, but looking for ways to improve their quality of service and ensure they get enough time flying the jets that are their passion. 'We've got to make sure — not just with pilots, but across our highlight skilled areas within our workforce — that they have the opportunity to do what they've been trained, what they love to do,' Meink said. 'Since I was a navigator, we've always struggled with maintaining pilot levels. It is much larger than just the funding.'
