New Air Force “Sentinel” ICBM to Fire Off 2024 – Counter Future Threats

By Kris Osborn, President, Center for Military Modernization

(Washington D.C.) What if the continental US were unexpectedly targeted by a massive salvo of incoming enemy nuclear missiles, a wave large and wide enough to simply overwhelm missile defenses and explode multiple locations across the country at once? Added to this seemingly unthinkable challenge, what if the undersea and air legs of the triad were not sufficiently forward positioned or able to launch a large enough nuclear counterstrike to ensure total destruction of the attacking country?

ICBMs

While the nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines such as the emerging Columbia-class and the nuclear-capable air platforms such as the B-2, B-52 and emerging B-21 are more than capable of launching a nearly immediate catastrophic response on any enemy launching nuclear attacks on the US, could they ensure the delivery of enough nuclear weapons to ensure total annihilation of the attacking country? If not, then could an adversary think it possible to prevail in a nuclear exchange by completely destroying a country while suffering smaller scale destruction itself? What then, is the deterrent against an enemy thinking it could launch a massive ICBM attack on a target country while sustaining a much smaller degree of impact itself? The answer here seems clear…. US Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. Hundreds of ground launched ICBMs could, if launched in time, ensure the complete and total destruction of an entire attacking country with a corresponding massive “salvo” of nuclear missile attacks. Is not this assured destruction the entire premise of strategic deterrence?

If so, then there is little question that peace and safety from nuclear attack relies, at least to a substantial extent, upon the existence of a large number of ICBMs. This is why the Air Force and Pentagon are currently pursuing a nuanced, multipronged nuclear deterrence strategy which includes both sustaining a viable and functioning 1960s-era Minuteman III arsenal and sustaining steady success and progress with ongoing development of 400 new Sentinel ICBMs. The intent of this dual trajectory is to ensure there is no “missile gap,” or window of time during which the Minuteman III becomes fully obsolete and an operational Sentinel arrives. The Pentagon simply does not want to risk any kind of “gap” or deficit when it comes to a land-based nuclear deterrent, which is why weapons developers continue to fast-track the Sentinel and also fire and upgrade the Minuteman III until the end of the decade when the new ICBM arrives.

“I think we have an excellent shot at making sure that there is no gap when something unexpected occurs. The timeline for the central program is designed to make sure that there isn’t a gap. We will have a 100% credible and effective nuclear deterrent continuously throughout the next several decades. If we run into challenges, and by the way, that’s probably reasonable to assume there will be challenges as we get into our acquisition programs, because there always are, then we’ll have to look at whether we have to adjust. Right now my expectation is that there will be no gap,” Air Force Acquisition Executive Andrew Hunter said recently at the 2022 Air Force Association Symposium.

The Sentinel maker Northrop Grumman, the industry partner supporting Hunter and the Air Force, agrees the progress on the emerging new weapon has been quite substantial.

“The team has made a lot of progress since we were awarded in September of 2020. A lot of design work is going on. We are about the enter reviews of the critical designs we have been working on over the past two year. We are building hardware we have the first couple stages of the motors cast which means the propellant has been poured into the motor. Eventually we will start firing off motors, first on the ground and then eventually get toward the first flight of the missile in 2024,” Frank Demauro, Vice President of Strategic Deterrence, Northrop Grumman, told Warrior in an interview at the 2022 AFA Symposium “The test launch will be in fiscal year 2024. Ahead of that we actually fire off the different stages on the ground to make sure we are getting the performance out of them before we actually put a missile together.”