The U.S. Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center may hold an industry day in late August at Hill AFB, Utah to gauge industry capacity to support a possible ICBM Development, Operations, and Sustainment (IDOS) program for the Boeing [BA] Minuteman III (MMIII).
Such a contract would “ensure continued operational readiness, availability, reliability, and maintainability of the MMIII weapon system and associated programs through end of life,” according to a Friday business notice.
“The MMIII weapon system is tracked through a work breakdown structure with about 2,800 individual risk-rated line items listed/monitored with up to 125 product support initiatives tracked annually across approximately 65 working groups,” the notice said.
The Air Force has said that extending the life of the 1970s-era Minuteman III’s long-term is not “viable” and that the service plans to replace the Minuteman III with Sentinel in the 2030s.
In April, a Congressional Budget Office study estimated that Pentagon nuclear modernization would cost at least $946 billion between this year and 2034—a projection that does not include “significant additional increase in costs” that may stem from a restructuring of the program to replace MMIII–the Northrop Grumman [NOC] LGM-35A Sentinel– and delays that are to come with Air Force efforts to reduce costs after the service notified Congress of a Nunn-McCurdy critical cost breach for Sentinel in January last year (Defense Daily, May 30). Sentinel’s estimated cost has more than doubled to $140 billion, and this month’s annual Government Accountability Office weapons systems assessment said that costs could easily reach $170 billion in fiscal 2025 dollars.
“If the president determines—which is his right—that we need to maintain 400 warheads on ICBMs, there are lots of ways we can do that,” Jon Wolfsthal, director of global risk at the Federation of American Scientists and a former nonproliferation adviser to the Obama administration, told the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “During the Obama administration in 2016, we suggested that you could take the 200 most reliable Minuteman IIIs and simply put two warheads on each of them. You would cut the reliability risk of the ICBM program significantly, because you could take the most reliable, most modern of the Minuteman IIIs and maintain two warheads on each. This wouldn’t risk inviting an attack because Russia or China would still have to strike at 200 fixed land targets. So, you still would have the sponge and a very visible deterrent, but that was rejected by the Air Force as unworkable, even though it turns out the Sentinel program is also unworkable.”