![]() “The case has been made.” Moreover, the cost of extending Minuteman “does nothing but go up as we discover more things” breaking “as time goes by.” “From strictly a business case, I think the data is there,” he added. Strategic Command, while Minuteman will not. “I think we have the data to back up that story that it is more cost effective to go down the GBSD route, let alone that GBSD will meet the future requirements” of U.S. “Right now, I just do not see the data” that life-extending Minuteman “is a cost-effective option for us,” he said. He added that the GBSD model-and that for Minuteman, going forward-is to engage predictive maintenance technologies that no longer wait for things to break and then fix them, but instead anticipate when things will break and correct the issues beforehand. It was a decision to “stop trying to keep solving that problem and replace this with a system that we can work on that is more reliable, that is safer, and is easier to maintain.” The GBSD system and the Long-Range Stand-Off missile, which will replace the Air-Launched Cruise Missile, “are most certainly designed that way from the get-go,” Genatempo said. “That’s why the decision was made” to go ahead with GBSD, he said. Genatempo said the things that keep him up at night regarding the health of the Minuteman are things such as heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems and other 60-year-old infrastructure that go with Minuteman that have never been replaced-and the failure of which is largely unpredictable and would take a missile offline for an unknown amount of time as it is fixed. The GBSD, rather, has been designed to be easily and quickly updateable to respond to new technology and threat changes, he said. “We are building GBSD to be a 70-year weapon system that we can maintain and increase its capability to stay relevant over 70 years.” The difference is that Minuteman’s several updates-the last of which was in 2010-were all retroactive and required significant reverse engineering, he said. “Minuteman III was a 10-year weapon system that was asked to last 60 years,” he said. Genatempo, director of the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center and program executive officer for strategic systems. The GBSD will most likely be a “70-year system,” said Maj. That 2015 decision is still borne out by the data, and “now we need to keep our foot on the gas,” Ray said. “We’re just going to run out of time” addressing risks to the ICBM leg of the nuclear triad from disappearing sources for parts, “the complexity of threats,” and the overall “decay” of the 60-year-old Minuteman III, which was originally intended to serve for 10 years.Īnalyses of alternatives showed conclusively seven years ago that the cost to extend the life of the Minuteman III far outweighed the cost and benefits in effectiveness, maintainability, and capability from going forward with a new system, he said. Ray asserted that time is up to press on with ICBM modernization. ![]() “Both of our technical teams … were able to follow Northrop Grumman’s design architecture,” he said. The first review of the all-up system was a six-hour session “in the model,” he added. “You can’t do that unless you’re operating in” a digital environment, he said. While the deployment schedule is challenging, Bartolomei said, he is confident it will happen because of the exhaustive modeling and simulation done on the system to find precisely the right combination of cost, capability, and performance.ĭuring the technology maturation and risk reduction phase, which lasted from 2016 to 2020, contractors created “six billion different configurations” of the missile, showing the “cost versus capability of their design for every requirement ” a “staggering” statistic, Bartolomei said. GBSDs will be deployed to missile silos an average of once a week for nine years, officials said. The GBSD is expected to achieve initial operational capability in 2029 and full operational capability with 400 missiles seven years later in 2036, Bartolomei said. The GBSD is being developed by Northrop Grumman.īy the end of calendar 2023, Bartolomei said, “we’ll be at Vandenberg, and we’ll be flying the first test flights of the new weapon system.” The missile is already flying in a “modeling and simulation environment,” he said. Jason Bartolomei said in an AFA Doolittle Leadership Center virtual forum June 14. “We’re … already in critical design review for the subsystems, and we’re months away from first flight,” Air Force GBSD program manager Col. The first example of the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent missile will fly by the end of calendar year 2023 from Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif., program officials revealed, while emphasizing that there’s no further margin to extend the Minuteman III system without risking the credibility of the intercontinental ballistic missile force.
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