“We’ve squeezed all the performance we can out of the Minuteman,” said Gen. Stephen “S.L.” Davis, commander of Air Force Global Strike Command. Potential adversary threats to the Minuteman ICBM have “changed dramatically” since its deployment in the Cold War, Davis added.
The $141 billion estimate is already outdated, after the Air Force announced last year it must build new silos for the Sentinel missile. Planners had intended to repurpose existing Minuteman III silos for the new weapons, but engineers concluded that retrofitting the aging facilities would be too slow and too costly.
Instead, the Air Force, working with contractors and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, will excavate hundreds of new sites across Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming. Military and industry officials said the new silos will include 24 forward launch centers, three centralized wing command centers, and more than 5,000 miles of fiber to link the system.
Sentinel, which officially began in 2016, will be the largest U.S. government civil-works project since the interstate highway system and the most complex acquisition the Air Force has ever pursued, wrote Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) and Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Nebraska) in a 2024 Wall Street Journal op-ed.
Gen. Dale White, the Pentagon’s director of critical major weapons systems, said Wednesday the Defense Department plans to finish a “restructuring” of the Sentinel program by year’s end. Only after that will an updated budget be disclosed.
The military stopped constructing new missile silos in the late 1960s and hasn’t developed a new ICBM since the 1980s. The consequences are visible.
