NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.–The ground support segment for the future LGM-35A intercontinental ballistic missile by Northrop Grumman [NOC] “has really turned the corner,” U.S. Air Force Gen. Dale White, the direct reporting portfolio manager for critical major weapon systems, told reporters here on Monday.
The Pentagon may undertake a re-certification of Sentinel for engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) in December.
The Air Force is restructuring the Sentinel program after a critical Nunn-McCurdy cost breach in January 2024 led to a revocation of Sentinel’s 2020 EMD certification, and the Government Accountability Office’s recently-released annual weapon systems assessment said the program faces considerable uncertainty amid ongoing design maturation, the complexity of building missile infrastructure across multiple states, and supply chain and workforce challenges that could further affect cost and schedule (Defense Daily, July 6).
“We stood up the infrastructure part of the program,” White said on Monday in a reporters roundtable at the Air & Space Forces Association’s annual conference. “We now have an Army Corps of Engineers commander for Joint Task Force-Castle that reports directly up to me and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers commander,” he said. “That allows us to really focus on making sure we get the infrastructure part of this program on track and making sure it does not become the thing that prevents us from succeeding.”
In the restructuring of Sentinel, “one of the first things we had to do is we had to bring the four-star level requirements owners together and have a hard conversation, and it started with the size of the launch control complexes,” White said on Monday. “Those were a lot of unknowns. We have since pretty much locked down the majority of the design to do that.”
“The requirements area, specifically as it relates to facilities and infrastructure, has really turned the corner,” he said.
The Air Force and Northrop Grumman said they recently completed a full assembly of the LGM-35A Sentinel future intercontinental ballistic missile in its “operational orientation” as the service prepares for an initial flight test of the missile from a pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif., in June of next year (Defense Daily, Sept. 14).
The “vertical stacking” demonstration at Vandenberg Space Force Base (VSFB), California was completed in parallel with a critical design review for Sentinel, which Northrop Grumman said confirmed “the missile’s design maturity and hardware testing meet Air Force requirements for performance, safety and schedule for flight test in 2027.”
The recent vertical stacking exercise, dubbed Pathfinder, involved transporting Sentinel components “on specially designed vehicles from across the U.S. to VSFB,” with Northrop Grumman noting its engineers “rigorously tested mechanical operations including transportation, mobile crane use and safe vertical integration while validating all interface connections on the test pad.”
