The U.S. Air Force and DoD are to complete a Nunn-McCurdy review of the Northrop Grumman [NOC] LGM-35A Sentinel next generation ICBM in the next six weeks, Pentagon acquisition chief William LaPlante said on May 15.
“In the case of the Nunn-McCurdy [breach], I’ve committed to working with the Air Force and with the cross DoD team to go through the letter of the law and make sure that, if we do recertify it, and it’s not a guarantee that we recertify, the program is executable and will meet replacing that leg of the [nuclear] triad,” LaPlante testified in response to a question from Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) at a hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s defense (SAC-D) panel.
“We’re about a month and a half from the end of that process,” LaPlante said. “We have a lot of work going on, and I will continue to keep this committee informed, but, separate from the Nunn-McCurdy [review], we need a triad.”
The Air Force told Congress in January that the bill for Sentinel had risen above the Nunn-McCurdy’s 25 percent critical cost breach threshold to an estimated $125 billion, a 37 percent increase from the previous $95 billion estimate.
The per-unit cost for missiles rose to $162 million from $118 million in 2020 in what Air Force officials have attributed to unforeseen construction costs, including new silos and wiring (Defense Daily, March 11).
At the May 15 SAC-D hearing, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) asked Air Force acquisition chief Andrew Hunter about Air Force Global Strike Command’s (AFGSC) Site Activation Task Force, established by Section 1638 of the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act.
Air Force Brig. Gen. Colin Connor heads the task force as AFGSC’s director of ICBM modernization at Barksdale AFB, La.
The task force “is to bring operational views into the process of the Sentinel program,” Reed said. “How is that task force working, and how are they helping, I hope, with the Nunn-McCurdy breach?”
“Senator, they are helping,” Hunter replied. “I work very closely with Gen. Connor who leads that task force. I meet with him on a very regular basis, as we go through the Sentinel/Nunn-McCurdy process, but, of course, we continue to execute that program while we’re going through the Nunn-McCurdy process.”
“We view B-21 as the best model for integrating our operators and our acquirers, and that is the model we are looking to execute with Sentinel,” Hunter testified. “We haven’t reached quite that B-21 level of integration yet, but we are well on our way. We have staffed up in the program office with operators and maintainers from [Air Force] Global Strike [Command], and we are starting to see benefits of that, especially as we go through some of the design choices we have to make to get to where we wanna be in the Nunn-McCurdy process.”
Northrop Grumman also is building the future air leg of the triad, the B-21 Raider stealth bomber.