“We’ve gotten all the capability we can out of the Minuteman,” said Gen. Stephen “SL” Davis, commander of Air Force Global Strike Command. Davis said potential enemy threats to the Minuteman ICBM have “evolved substantially” since its initial deployment in the Cold War.
The $141 billion figure is already out of date, as the Air Force announced last year that it would need to build new silos for the Sentinel missile. The original plan was to adapt existing Minuteman III silos for the new weapons, but engineers determined that modifying the old Minuteman facilities would take too long and cost too much.
Instead, the Air Force, in partnership with contractors and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, will dig hundreds of new holes in Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota and Wyoming. Military and industry officials said the new silos will include 24 new forward launch centers, three centralized wing command centers and more than 5,000 miles of fiber connections.
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) and Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Nebraska) wrote in a 2024 op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal that Sentinel, which officially debuted in 2016, will be the largest U.S. government civil works project since the completion of the Interstate Highway System, and the most complex acquisition program ever undertaken by the Air Force.
Gen. Dale White, the Pentagon’s director of critical major weapons systems, said Wednesday that the Defense Department plans to complete a “restructuring” of the Sentinel program by the end of the year. Only after this the updated budget will be made public.
The Army stopped building new missile silos in the late 1960s and has not developed any new ICBMs since the 1980s. It shows.
<a href