New ICBM effort won’t slow down despite pledges to ‘restructure’ as costs balloon

The Pentagon is barreling ahead with the construction of its next intercontinental ballistic missile even though the Air Force doesn’t have a plan yet to restructure the costly program.

Last week, defense acquisition chief William LaPlante announced that the Air Force will continue its Sentinel program, even though its cost has soared 81 percent beyond initial estimates, because—LaPlante averred—it’s still the best course of action as today’s Minuteman missiles age. The troubled program, whose total cost is now projected to cost $141 billion, will be “restructured” to fix the “root causes” of the ballooning costs, LaPlante said. 

“Work can still continue under the contract that exists today, so we don’t want to slow down, come to a full stop on the program. But there definitely needs to be a restructure to get after the cost growth that’s happened,” said Lt. Gen. Andrew Gebara, the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration.

LaPlante said he has rescinded Sentinel’s Milestone B decision, which enables a program to move from “technology maturation and risk reduction” to “engineering and manufacturing development,” and won’t restore it until the program is restructured.

But Sentinel construction shouldn’t be halted while they await a new Milestone B decision, Gebara said Monday at a Mitchell Institute event.

“I was on the Hill multiple days last week,” he said. “No one was happy with cost growth, and I think that absolutely in the Air Force, we’re not happy with that either, so we do need to think about ways to get after that, but I don’t think we should think of it as a ‘full stop to the program until we can get to a new Milestone B’.”

Defense officials acknowledged that Sentinel’s development-and-production price tag may rise beyond $141 billion. The Air Force won’t have a final number until the program gets a new baseline, which will take “18 to 24 months,” Andrew Hunter, the Air Force’s acquisition chief, said last week. “When we restructure the program, we will bring a new program baseline to Dr. LaPlante for approval, so that will be the new baseline for the program, and those numbers may vary slightly from the numbers that we're discussing today.”

Gebara said the cost growth had less to do with the missile and more with the massive amount of infrastructure work required to build “all the launch facilities, all the launch centers, all the wiring, all that goes into that.” 

“That’s the kind of work that we’ll roll up our sleeves and get back to and figure out the best program to provide to get to a Milestone B decision in the future,” he said.

LaPlante also said last week that Sentinel will be delayed “several years,” which means the Pentagon will have to keep using its current Minuteman III missiles for much longer than it wants. 

After the results of the Nunn-McCurdy review, Gebara said that sustainment funds for Minuteman III have to keep flowing, so it stays viable until Sentinel is delivered. 

The Air Force has enough money for its current sustainment plan, but Gebara warned of  “unknown unknowns” that might pop up and drive up future sustainment costs for Minuteman III. 

“We’re funded on what we know about now, we’re funding on what we can predict will happen, and then we have commitment from both the Department of Air Force level, Department of defense level, and assurances [from] Congress that as those unknown unknowns develop, that those will be funded as well,” he said.