Latest news with #MinutemanIIIICBMs
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.'
Daily Mail
23-04-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
REVEALED: The UFO sightings taken seriously by the US government
A 'flame in the sky,' eerie red glowing objects and swarms of UFOs over military bases are just some of the many sightings that have gravely concerned the US government. There are dozens of unsolved cases going back to the 1960s that occurred over nuclear missile installations, Navy ships and a desert in New Mexico. The FBI, CIA, and other government branches have spent years looking into these reports, but have yet to determine what the objects were and where they came from. One report in 2019 detailed how 'drones' appeared over Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Kansas as locals reported spying a mothership hanging in the sky. In just the last few months, the skies over New Jersey were filled with unidentified aircraft and drones that required a formal response from both the Biden and Trump presidencies. Now, as the current administration weighs declassifying many of these UFO-related incidents, there could soon be new information about some of the key close encounters the government has taken extremely seriously over the years. Base attacked for 17 days Swarms of small UFOs were tracked at dusk above Joint Base Langley-Eustis for at least 17 nights in December 2023. Witnesses reported them 'moving at rapid speeds,' displaying 'flashing red, green, and white lights' and sounding like a fleet of lawn mowers. These brazen penetrations over the base — home to at least half the Air Force's F-22 Raptor stealth fighter jets — led to two weeks of emergency White House meetings. 'Drones' sweeping over the Midwest Reports of mysterious 'drones' swept through eastern Colorado and nearby areas of Nebraska, Wyoming, and Kansas over the winter of 2019 into 2020. The sightings were in close proximity to some of America's sensitive, nuclear-equipped intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). 'They all seem clustered in an area that has quite a few Minuteman sites,' an official confessed in one email. 'We do not know the origin of the drones,' wrote another official at the base, which houses 150 Minuteman III ICBMs. The author then added the hashtag '# aliens.' Witnesses reported that lights on these craft were sometimes 'flashing or steady white, red, or green.' Staff at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming claimed they also saw a 'mothership' six feet in diameter flanked by 10 smaller drones (some fixed wing, some not).' 'When deputies follow the drones, they clock them at speeds of 60-70 mph,' the base official continued. An internal January 8, 2020 email released by F.E. Warren's 90th Security Forces Group was adamant that drones are '100,000,000,000% not us.' 'I've seen some articles pointing the finger as us [sic],' one member of the base stated, 'but I can definitely say this is not our team.' An infrared image showed the three UAS off of the USS Paul Hamilton on July 17th, 2019. A 'swarm' of them hovered near the ship for several hours, in just one of the many occurrences Naval ships saw over the course of weeks Invasion over the Southern California coast Sailors on board a fleet of Navy warships sailing in the Pacific near San Diego witnessed their ships being swarmed by a host of UFOs from July 15 to 30 in 2019. The incident went on for hours, with craft hovering and zipping around near the fleet with flashing multicolored lights. Deputy Director for Naval Intelligence Scott Bray tried to dismiss the incidences, telling Congress in 2022 that he was 'reasonably confident' the objects were drones — but the solution raises its own national security concerns. One senior source from a defense contractor told the Liberation Times that same year that these strange swarms, appeared to be 'much more advanced' than traditional drones. This defense expert also noted that the crafts' behavior made little espionage sense. 'Chinese drones intent on spying would not announce themselves with flashing lights,' the source noted. There was a Hong Kong-flagged bulk carrier, the Bass Strait, which sailed past one of the US ships around the same time as one of these so-called 'drone swarm' incidents. That led to the US Navy suspecting that the Bass Strait was an espionage front, 'likely using UAVs to conduct surveillance on US Naval Forces.' All told, at least eight Navy warships off the coast of California faced these repeated aerial incursions by 'unmanned aerial system' (UAS) swarms. 'Go Fast' and 'Gimbal' Between the summer of 2014 and March 2015, UFOs were spotted almost every day over the skies off the East Coast, in a case made famous by Navy infrared footage released in 2017. Infrared cockpit-camera footage taken on a later sortie by the same U.S. Navy squadron reveals another immensely fast-flying object, this one spinning in mid-air and moving against a 120-knot wind, again accompanied by commentary from totally baffled airmen. The video showed one tiny white speck and one large, dark blob, which would later be known as 'Go Fast' and 'Gimbal.' These highly qualified Navy pilots, told superiors the objects seemingly defied the laws of physics. About 30-40ft long and shaped like a Tic Tac mint, they had no wings or rotors — in fact, they had no discernible means of propulsion or flight — and, yet, they could hover in the sky, slow suddenly and accelerate almost instantaneously to hypersonic speeds of a mile a second. Radar showed they could fly as high as 80,000ft. One pilot compared their remarkable maneuverability to a ping-pong ball bouncing off a wall. The resulting G-force would crush any humans inside. A near collision was recorded in an official mishap report, when, in late 2014, the pilot of a Super Hornet fighter jet almost hit one of them. The pilot said it looked like a sphere encasing a cube. Some of these UFOs, looked like a 'dark gray cube inside of a clear sphere,' said Lt Ryan Graves, a pilot of ten years' service. 'These things would be there all day.' Orbs and flying saucers in New Mexico Scientists at the top secret White Sands missile test range witnessed waves of orb-like UFOs and 'flying saucers' seemingly spying on their work in 2013/ The smaller, more orb-like UFOs appeared to be greatly interested in the White Sands team's current classified projects, perhaps aware of the site's long history with the WWII-era Manhattan Project that built America's first atomic bomb. Witnesses said the 'orbs moved toward the test site, hovered over the device as if scanning it for intel, 'then zipped away ... over the heads of bewildered scientists.' Witnesses said the ' orbs moved toward the test site, hovered over the device as if scanning it for intel, 'then zipped away ... over the heads of bewildered scientists' 'Tic Tac' UFOs in 2004 Witnesses to an infamous 2004 UFO incident reveal 'Tic-Tacs' spotted flying at incredible speeds by top Navy pilots off the California coast were also picked up on sonar speeding underwater. On November 14 2004, Top Gun fighter pilot David Fravor was flying a training exercise off the coast of San Diego when he was re-routed to investigate a strange object spotted on radar by warships protecting his aircraft carrier the USS Nimitz. What he found was a roughly 40-foot white object with no windows or wings, shaped like a Tic-Tac, flitting about above the sea that was roiling below it, disturbed by something large submerged beneath the surface. Commander Fravor told Congress in 2023 that as he circled the object, it turned to mirror his movements, then shot off past him at thousands of miles per hour. It then stopped a second later at a secret pre-designated rendezvous point 60 miles away that only he and a handful of Navy staff on his ship were given ahead of their training exercise. UFOs larger than an aircraft carrier Japanese pilots flying over Alaska in 1986 radioed to air traffic control in shock over seeing three unidentified lighted objects keeping pace with their aircraft. According to Captain Kenju Terauchi, his first officer and flight engineer saw a giant round UFO as big as an aircraft carrier and flashing multicolored lights. The UFOs were releasing fire similar to that of jet engines and then formed a small circle of lights that transformed into a square. The FAA's then-division chief for accidents and investigations, John Callahan, investigated this case, pouring over radio communications, radar data, witness statements and more. Callahan briefed the Reagan White House on JAL1628's gigantic UFO sighting, in a meeting also attended by representatives from the FBI, CIA, and three people from President Reagan's scientific study team. According to Captain Kenju Terauchi, his first officer and flight engineer saw a giant round UFO as big as an aircraft carrier and flashing multicolored lights According to Captain Kenju Terauchi, his first officer and flight engineer they also saw a giant round UFO as big as an aircraft carrier with flashing multicolored lights. FAA's then-division chief for accidents and investigations, John Callahan, personally investigated this case 'One of the guys from the CIA,' Callahan recalled, 'they actually swore all these other guys into, 'This never took place. We never had this meeting, and this was never recorded.'' 'I asked them at the time,' he continued, ''If there was something there and if it's not the [then in development] Stealth Bomber, then you know it's a UFO. And if it's a UFO, why wouldn't you want the people to know?'' 'He said if they come out and told the American public that they ran into a UFO out there,' the senior FAA investigator said, 'it would cause panic across the country.' UFOs appearing during the Cold War At the height of the Cold War, a then 26-year-old US Air Force Lieutenant Salas was underground overseeing Malmstrom Air Force Base's nuclear equipped intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in Montana. He claimed an eerie red glowing UFO above the base's front gate temporarily disabled 10 ICBMs on the night of March 24, 1967 — a case that has since brought Salas to Congress and to the offices of the Pentagon's new UFO-hunters at AARO. 'I offered to even go there on my own expense. I would be happy to fully brief any congressman, or anybody from DoD,' Salas told in 2022. A USAF Strategic Air Command document written for ICBM manufacturer Boeing and released via FOIA seems to confirm the event, saying: 'All ten missiles in Echo Flight at Malmstrom lost [strategic] alert within ten seconds of each other.' Strategic Air Command noted having a 'grave concern' about the case. 'Flame in the sky' over New Mexico A police officer stands near to his patrol car outside the town of Socorro, New Mexico where a flying saucer was spotted in 1964 Socorro Police Department officer Lonnie Zamora was chasing a speeder in 1694 when he spotted what he later described as 'a flame in the sky' about a half-mile away accompanied by a loud 'roar.' Zamora followed the 'bluish and sort of orange' flame in his patrol car, soon witnessing an egg-shaped white craft parked in the desert with 'two people in white coveralls' standing near the parked UFO. 'One of these persons seemed to turn and look straight at my car and seemed startled,' Zamora told investigators, who collected physical evidence of burns and landing gear marks at the site. Despite the FBI, the CIA, and the Air Force having a go at the case, they confessed they came up empty handed.
Bloomberg
27-03-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Air Force Weighs Keeping 1970s-Era Missiles Until 2050
The US Air Force is considering contingency plans that would extend the life of 1970s-era intercontinental ballistic missiles by 11 more years to 2050 if delays continue to plague the new Sentinel models intended to replace them. The current plan is to remove all 400 Minuteman III ICBMs made by Boeing Co. from silos by 2039. But the Air Force and lead contractor Northrop Grumman Corp. must manage the elaborate process to take out the older missiles, refurbish the silos and then install Sentinels — a missile minuet that must be accomplished without letting down the nation's nuclear guard.
Asia Times
12-02-2025
- Business
- Asia Times
US Sentinel missile stalls as China, Russia steam ahead
As the US struggles with delays and cost overruns in its Sentinel missile program, China and Russia are pressing forward with cutting-edge missile developments, potentially tilting the global nuclear balance in their favor. This month, Defense One reported that the US Air Force has paused work on key segments of its Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program to address escalating costs and restructure its acquisition strategy, as confirmed by service officials. The US$141 billion program—81% over its initial budget—is intended to replace the aging 1970s-era Minuteman III ICBMs, which may have reached the end of their service lives and upgrade potential. Northrop Grumman, the program's prime contractor, was directed to halt design, testing, and construction work for the Command and Launch Segment at various facilities, including Vandenberg Space Force Base in California and Hill Air Force Base in Utah. Work on training devices and security systems has also been suspended. The decision follows a July 2024 announcement of restructuring efforts after costs surged and US Department of Defense (DOD) officials ruled out alternative programs. Northrop CEO Kathy Warden acknowledged the work pause in January, stating that the restructuring could take up to 24 months. Despite the setback, Northrop has still achieved milestones under the engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) contract. The US Air Force is considering opening parts of its ground infrastructure to competition to reduce costs. While the timeline and scope of the restructuring remain unclear, the Sentinel program is vital for modernizing the US nuclear triad, which includes the Columbia-class nuclear ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) and B-21 bomber. A November 2024 report by the US Congressional Research Service (CRS) states that Sentinel is designed to address current and expected threats while being more cost-effective, modular, and maintaining the industrial base. The US Air Force plans to replace the Minuteman III missiles with Sentinel by 2029. While Sentinel's modular design promises cost-effective maintenance and future upgrades, these benefits are overshadowed by soaring costs and timeline slippage, potentially reducing the readiness of the US land-based nuclear arsenal. In stark contrast, the US DOD's 2024 China Military Power report highlights China's rapid expansion and modernization of its ICBM capabilities. The report mentions that China has approximately 400 operational missiles, including fixed and mobile launchers that can launch unitary or multiple warheads. China's strategic missile forces include silo-launched and road-mobile ICBMs. It has recently completed three new solid-propellant ICBM fields housing at least 300 silos, with development consistent with the US and Russia's launch-on-warning (LOW) systems. The report further notes that China is developing advanced nuclear delivery systems such as hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs) and fractional orbital bombardment (FOB) systems, which can bypass US missile defenses. Meanwhile, Russia is also upgrading its strategic missile forces. A March 2024 report by Hans Kristensen and others for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists notes that Russia is replacing aging Soviet-era ICBMs with advanced systems like the RS-24 Yars, which can carry four multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs). Kristensen and his co-authors note that Russia is phasing out the RS-20V Voevoda and introducing the RS-28 Sarmat, a missile capable of carrying up to 10 warheads with an extended range, including over the North and South Poles. New systems such as the Yars-M and Kedr, emphasizing greater mobility and stealth, are expected to replace current systems by 2030. The delays hampering the Sentinel program may force the US to rely on the aging Minuteman III far longer than anticipated. Keeping those missiles operational presents significant challenges, especially since some critical upgrade guides and component manufacturers no longer exist. However, Matt Korda argues in a March 2021 Federation of American Scientists (FAS) report that life-extending the Minuteman III is a more cost-effective and safer option than Sentinel, whose projected life-cycle cost of US$264 billion could severely strain the US defense budget. He highlights that a 2000s-era Minuteman III life extension program effectively turned 450 decades-old missiles into nearly new ones—except for their steel shells—at a cost of just $7 billion. Korda points out that many critical Minuteman III subsystems remain highly reliable, and advanced non-destructive testing methods could ensure their longevity without sacrificing operational readiness. He argues that modernizing Minuteman III would delay Sentinel development for decades, freeing resources for more immediate security priorities. His proposal gains weight when considering the significant budget pressures of modernizing all three legs of the US nuclear triad. Caleb Larson notes in a recent 1945 article that while the B-21 bomber program is estimated to cost $203 billion for 100 aircraft, it could face harsh scrutiny given the growing US budget deficit approaching $2 trillion yearly. Similarly, a September 2024 US Government Accountability Office (GAO) report highlights significant cost overruns and delays in the Columbia-class SSBN program. The report projects that the lead submarine may be delivered 12 to 16 months late—between October 2028 and February 2029—jeopardizing planned operational readiness in 2030. Persistent issues such as late materials, incomplete design products, and inexperienced staff undermine construction performance. The GAO estimates cost overruns in the hundreds of millions of dollars, far exceeding optimistic US Navy and shipbuilder estimates. Additionally, the report criticizes the US Navy for inadequate cost and schedule analysis, limiting effective risk management and corrective actions. These challenges are critical when the US faces renewed great power competition and potential nuclear brinksmanship. The US 2022 Nuclear Posture Review warns that by the 2030s, the US will encounter two major nuclear powers—China and Russia—as strategic competitors and potential adversaries for the first time in history. In light of that growing challenge, Philip Sheers and others argue in a May 2024 article for the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) that while the US cannot stop China and Russia from joining it as top nuclear powers, it can take specific steps to mitigate the consequences. They emphasize the importance of continuing to modernize the US nuclear arsenal while adopting new approaches to deterrence in a more complex, multipolar world. By doing so, the US can maintain its strategic edge and adapt to the evolving security environment.
