Northrop Grumman [NOC] said on Feb. 20 that several recent tests at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, Calif., reflect “significant progress” in the engineering, manufacturing and development (EMD) phase of the U.S. Air Force’s LGM-35A Sentinel future ICBM.
“Forward and aft sections of a Sentinel ICBM missile were evaluated through a rigorous test campaign at the company’s Strategic Missile Test and Production Complex in Promontory, Utah,” the company said. “The tests lower risk for the program with important data about the missile’s inflight structural dynamics. Data from the tests help engineering teams mature models, lower risk and ensure flight success.”
Sarah Willoughby, Northrop Grumman’s vice president and program manager of Sentinel, said in the company statement that the “shroud fly-off test proved our modeling predictions are solid, while the missile stack test demonstrated inflight missile performance, helping validate assumptions and fine-tune models.”
Beside the most recent EMD test, Northrop Grumman announced Sentinel hypersonic wind tunnel testing last February, a stage-one solid rocket motor static fire test last March, and a stage-two solid rocket motor static fire test last month.
Air Force Gen. Anthony Cotton, the head of U.S. Strategic Command, has said that his entire portfolio
is under examination for possible changes (Defense Daily, Feb. 2).
The Air Force has informed Congress of a 37 percent unit cost Nunn-McCurdy program breach on Sentinel–an increase in unit cost per missile from $118 million in 2020 to $162 million due to unpredicted military construction costs in what will be a massive civil works project to build Sentinel silos and ensure roads are able to accommodate missile transportation. The total program cost estimate is now more than $125 billion compared to more than $95 billion earlier.
Asked this month why he thought estimates for military construction costs for Sentinel fell far short and how to prevent such oversights in the future, Cotton replied, “I don’t know. I wish I knew the answer to that because, not only when it comes to Sentinel, but when it comes to all the modernization within my purview, all of that has to be taken into consideration.”
“That’s not just limited to the replacement of the ICBM,” he said. “That’s gonna be true when it comes to understanding MILCON across the portfolio. We’re gonna have to wise up to ensure that we understand what that means for all the legs of the triad and, to be frank, all modernization across the Department [of Defense] that really touches on MILCON and how you move that forward.”