LGM-35A Sentinel - Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) program

Forest Green said:
Anything not NBC is definitely non-WMD, although arguably a theoretical pure impact fusion weapon using small pellets that generates a blast smaller than say a FOAB could also be deemed non-WMD too.
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In the absence of a definition in the Treaty, it's open to argument... which in extremis includes arguing to use the US anti-terrorism definition, which includes any explosive bomb or grenade.

Which is a silly definition to use. But I've seen it used as an argument that Iraq had WMDs in 2003, and it was silly there as well.
 
Yellow Palace said:
In the absence of a definition in the Treaty, it's open to argument... which in extremis includes arguing to use the US anti-terrorism definition, which includes any explosive bomb or grenade.

Which is a silly definition to use. But I've seen it used as an argument that Iraq had WMDs in 2003, and it was silly there as well.
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The WMDs Iraq had in 2003 were chemicals. Not nukes.
 
Scott Kenny said:
The WMDs Iraq had in 2003 were chemicals. Not nukes.
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Be that as it may - I distinctly remember some commentators arguing that it didn't matter if they found chemicals or nukes, because they'd definitely found explosive bombs, and those (to their mind) counted.
 
breakingdefense.com

Air Force now expects Sentinel ICBMs will 'predominantly' need new silos - Breaking Defense

“Part of the requirements, initially — ten years ago when this program was started — was to reuse the holes, the missile holes at the launch facilities,” said Air Force Gen. Thomas Bussiere. “Shockingly enough, if we look at it, that may not be the answer.”
breakingdefense.com breakingdefense.com

Air Force now expects Sentinel ICBMs will ‘predominantly’ need new silos
“Part of the requirements, initially — ten years ago when this program was started — was to reuse the holes, the missile holes at the launch facilities,” said Air Force Gen. Thomas Bussiere. “Shockingly enough, if we look at it, that may not be the answer.”
By Michael Marrow on May 05, 2025 at 11:42 AM

WASHINGTON — The Air Force now believes its new nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles will “predominantly” require digging fresh missile silos, a significant change of plans to reuse existing silos and a move the service has previously assessed will come with major costs.

To house the new Sentinel ICBM, officials previously planned to refurbish 450 existing silos currently used by the Sentinel’s predecessor, the aging Minuteman III (MMIII). But as the Pentagon works through a cost breach analysis for Sentinel after its price tag ballooned last year, officials now expect existing silos will largely not be reusable after all.

“The Air Force continues to assess its options and design concepts as part of doing good systems engineering. While no decision has been made, we expect Sentinel to use predominantly AF-owned real estate to build new missile silos instead of re-using MMIII silos,” an Air Force spokesperson told Breaking Defense.

The Sentinel’s prime contractor, Northrop Grumman, referred a request for comment to the Air Force.

When the Pentagon certified Sentinel to continue last year amid a cost breach known as Nunn-McCurdy, officials explained that they would adopt changes to launch facilities, which would make them “more cost-effective as well as less complex.” Yet digging new silos would represent a dramatic change, particularly because a previous analysis of alternatives conducted around the time of the program’s inception reportedly found that doing so would incur prohibitive costs. Defense Daily previously reported the potential silo switchup, citing dialogues Air Force leaders have held with local communities.

The Sentinel program aims to procure 634 missiles — along with an additional 25 for development and testing — and deploy 400 of them in silos spread across vast missile fields in the Great Plains, stretching from Colorado to North Dakota near the Canadian border. A need to dig new silos means hundreds may have to be built.

During remarks at the Advanced Nuclear Weapons Alliance Deterrence Center on April 30, Air Force Global Strike Command chief Gen. Thomas Bussiere explained reusing the MMIII silos may not be feasible.

“Part of the requirements, initially — ten years ago when this program was started — was to reuse the holes, the missile holes at the launch facilities. That was believed to be more efficient, more cost effective and quicker,” Bussiere said. “Shockingly enough, if we look at it [now], that may not be the answer.” A decision has not been made, the general emphasized.

Sentinel has four different segments, according to Bussiere: command and launch consisting of facilities like silos and command centers; the missile itself; the missile’s payload; and support equipment. Officials have said the launch facility segment, consisting of the large-scale silo construction work and attendant features like modern cabling and new buildings, is the chief source of a roughly 81 percent budget breach and a new price tag of $141 billion. The program’s woes have also pushed back initial operational capability several years beyond an original 2029 forecast.

Upgrading the ICBMs are part of a massive nuclear modernization effort that one government organization says will cost $946 billion over the next decade.

Bussiere explained that officials are currently exploring different paths forward under Nunn-McCurdy, where “part of this process … is to look at the viability of using the same landscape, but potentially looking at maybe doing a different hole for the weapon, versus reusing the current hole,” he said.

The general then stated that officials are “pretty seriously” considering a plan to “reus[e] federal lands” that are “within our current footprint in our missile wings.” Calling the land “green fields,” Bussiere said that some of that land still in possession of the federal government could be utilized to “potentially expand our sequential fielding.” (Part of Sentinel’s vast construction is expected to require the federal government to negotiate easements with private property owners.)

“As we transition from the Minuteman III to the Sentinel… we have to maintain our minimum numbers of ICBMs on alert for the nation,” Bussiere said. “And that’s going to be a graceful ballet between ops and maintenance, acquisition, you know, a bunch of partners that are part of this program to make sure we get this right.”
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What kind of risk do you hostile drones pose to the new ICBM launch and missile control sites? Could a swarm of drones over a launch facility disrupt operations during the launch window? I’ve also wondered about that with bomber bases. What would happen if a drone swarm occupied the takeoff corridor while aircraft were still on the tarmac? They're such a cheap, creative, and asymmetric method of warfare.
 
The most serious risk to America's silos are intercontinental stealth bombers with GBU-53 type hard target penetrating glide bombs.

Drones are literally not a risk at all to a ICBM force. They never will be.
 
Kat Tsun said:
Drones are literally not a risk at all to a ICBM force. They never will be.
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(shrugginng) One-way stealth drone bomber with dual-penetration glide bombs. No need to fly back, no crew - could be order of magnitude cheaper than proper bomber.

P.S. Or drone Q-ship - a missile carrier, made on basic of civilian airliner and inserted into American airspace by replacing a civilian plane identifications. At proper moment it would release a hundred of stealth cruise missiles from within the NORAD perimeter (by the way, plot is copyrighted)
 
Dilandu said:
(shrugginng) One-way stealth drone bomber with dual-penetration glide bombs. No need to fly back, no crew - could be order of magnitude cheaper than proper bomber.

P.S. Or drone Q-ship - a missile carrier, made on basic of civilian airliner and inserted into American airspace by replacing a civilian plane identifications. At proper moment it would release a hundred of stealth cruise missiles from within the NORAD perimeter (by the way, plot is copyrighted)
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Drone bombers are a threat to silos, yes.

A swarm of drone quadcopters is not a threat to silos but could be a threat to bombers.
 
Kat Tsun said:
The most serious risk to America's silos are intercontinental stealth bombers with GBU-53 type hard target penetrating glide bombs.

Drones are literally not a risk at all to a ICBM force. They never will be.
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Depends. For example if you have automated enemy drones hidden near silos programmed, upon receipt of an wartime activation signal, to deploy and then attack silos when they open for launch, then you have may have a major problem on your hands.
 
Grey Havoc said:
Depends. For example if you have automated enemy drones hidden near silos programmed, upon receipt of an wartime activation signal, to deploy and then attack silos when they open for launch, then you have may have a major problem on your hands.
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It would be easy to store drones in a couple barns out in all of that rural country. Maybe they could disrupt communications, harass security forces, or do something else no one's thought of.
 
In_A_Dream said:
It would be easy to store drones in a couple barns out in all of that rural country. Maybe they could disrupt communications, harass security forces, or do something else no one's thought of.
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You'd have to own land by military bases. Oh, wait. I wonder if China would be stupid kind enough to let us buy land next to their military sites.
 
Dilandu said:
no crew - could be order of magnitude cheaper than proper bomber.
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Not really. Because for that payload and range requirement it would still need to be a very large aircraft. Very large stealth aircraft are always expensive, regardless if manned or not.

Aside from that, when you want to create a low observable strike platform that's only intended to be single use you literally just want a stealth cruise missile.
 
In_A_Dream said:
It would be easy to store drones in a couple barns out in all of that rural country. Maybe they could disrupt communications, harass security forces, or do something else no one's thought of.
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That's not easy at all, especially not near the silos. Especially not in the future where electronic warfare and jamming around high value assets will only increase.

The prospect of having any enemy force act near your literal ICBM silos in an attempt to sabotage them is pretty much near zero for any large nuclear power.
 
Sferrin said:
You'd have to own land by military bases. Oh, wait. I wonder if China would be stupid kind enough to let us buy land next to their military sites.
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My fear is a new hole will require a full environmental review adding years to the process or some outside environmental group sues and delays deployment for a decade or more.

Think I’m exaggerating one lefty judge is all it takes.
 
Arjen said:
I see that maintaining the rule of law is a leftist hobby these days.
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Not understanding Article II or purposeful ignorance or exercising [unelected] judicial tyranny over the proper authority and function of the executive branch is more accurate.

But let’s stick to the topic which I transgressed to my eternal shame in my original post.
 
In_A_Dream said:
It would be easy to store drones in a couple barns out in all of that rural country. Maybe they could disrupt communications, harass security forces, or do something else no one's thought of.
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Nuns generally just pour buckets of pigs blood on a silo door before the SFs arrest them for trespassing. Nowadays the SFs would probably call the sheriff's department while yelling at them to get away. Maybe the SFs try to shoo away a drone carrying the bucket of red paint that's writing "TRUMP STINKS" on the silo door, or someone has one of those fancy net guns, or runs up to throw a blanket on it to capture it.

The only hard target threat to the Minuteman force in Middle America is a mass, national-level strategic attack by stealth bombers. Anything less than this is the realm of teenage techno-thriller fantasies. Anything that isn't a stealth bomber, like an SLBM or a ICBM, simply arrives at an empty silo.

The B-2 force might be at actual risk of being hit by quadcopters I guess, but only because like the Tu-160 there's less than a couple dozen functional articles at a single airbase. The B-52s aren't at risk at all, neither are the B-1s, and B-21 also won't be at serious risk since it'll have multiple airbases.

Sferrin said:
You'd have to own land by military bases. Oh, wait. I wonder if China would be stupid kind enough to let us buy land next to their military sites.
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America probably shouldn't have built its most sensitive military facilities next to prime beachfront property and farmland and then never bothered moving it to the Sonoran 30 years later. That's why China is building all its new generation nuclear infrastructure on a featureless, resourceless, economically irrelevant desertic plateau that no one wants. You might even say China is doing what Reagan couldn't.

Of course that has nothing to do with a fanciful attack method. That's childhood fantasy. It's because the current silos are getting in the way of ranches and farmland, just like they are in America, except China can actually build things. Thankfully with how absolutely ruined the Minuteman fields are, the USA may just be forced to build silos in the desert or in Alaska, like a normal country.

If China wanted to destroy America's missile fields, it would take another page from America's book, and use intercontinental bombers with hard target penetrating glide bombs to obliterate them in a single massed attack. Drones aren't a threat against silos because a 50,000 psi concrete square is immune to a 40mm HEDP grenade and the necessary payload capacity drones to defeat a bunker hard silo door, while they exist, resemble a large air-launched cruise missile more than a DJI Phantom.

A JASSM with a BROACH warhead would be the only drone that's harming a Minuteman field. Conveniently available for bomber launching! A Small Diameter Bomb is a way better and smarter method to defeat a concrete bunker though. Especially for something as distributed and numerous as a nuclear missile field, where targets number in the low triple digits usually, of course.

A flight of B-2s, or H-20s, could credibly demolish America's land-based missile force in a surprise attack using SDBs.

Hopefully once DAF realizes the Minuteman fields are unsalvageable, the MM3 force is LEPed to 2050, and the replacement program seeks 100-120 MM3 class ICBMs (or Trident derivatives) for the second half of this century, they'll pick a better spot than "next to a dairy farm".
 
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Sferrin said:
Which doesn't mean it should be allowed to be owned by Chinese nationals.
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A lot of things slipped through the cracks during previous administrations. Also, legitimate owners wouldn't necessarily have any idea that someone had cached hidden drones on their property, especially with regards as to remote or long disused properties. Complicating matters further, there are design concepts for drones that can burrow into the ground or otherwise be hidden under the surface (including bodies of water) and remain in sleep or standby mode for long periods that date all the way back to the Cold War. And that's even before we get to things like mobile mines.
 
Grey Havoc said:
A lot of things slipped through the cracks during previous administrations. Also, legitimate owners wouldn't necessarily have any idea that someone had cached hidden drones on their property, especially with regards as to remote or long disused properties. Complicating matters further, there are design concepts for drones that can burrow into the ground or otherwise be hidden under the surface (including bodies of water) and remain in sleep or standby mode for long periods that date all the way back to the Cold War. And that's even before we get to things like mobile mines.
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Again, this doesn't mean it should be ignored.
 
Scott Kenny said:
The WMDs Iraq had in 2003 were chemicals. Not nukes.
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There weren't any. At all.

The only "chemical weapons" found in Iraq in 2003 totaled about 36 empty 120mm (or 82mm) mortar bombs that potentially could have been configured to carry chemical agents, as well as several dozen tactical ammo storage areas that had been created during the Iran-Iraq War by battalion or brigade officers. These ammo dumps on the border were subsequently not marked on maps and completely forgotten about.

All of these were buried in random fields, not factories, of course. The idea that the Scud missiles that Saddam had were liquid carriers is also ridiculous, becuase nothing was actually found in that regard, and the supposedly liquid carrying rockets ended up hitting 3d ID's division command post in a combined strike by several missile regiments with simple high explosives, on 7 APR 03.

Apparently also an IED was produced by insurgents using a warhead casing from a testing lab at al-Muthanna, which had trace concentrations of sarin because the warhead was a binary agent and ended up getting partially mixed during the blast, but that was because the warhead that had been recovered was used for leak testing during the 1980s. The insurgents simply found it in an old bunker. It was the only time in 2003 anyone was exposed to chemical agents in combat. There were also several hundred or dozen barrels of yellowcake, which had been under sanction by the IAEA, and thus Iraq was ordered to retain them and not destroy them. These eventually ended up in Canada for enrichment IIRC as part of the post-war plunder.

All poisonings in the Gulf happened in 1991, as a result of a botched/inept U.S. Army engineers' destruction of the main storage depot for chemical weapons in southern Iraq, which produced a cloud of low concentration nerve agents that drifted over Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and caused organophosphate poisoning in a small number of highly sensitive individuals. This explains the "Gulf War Syndrome".

By all accounts from DA, the UN, and UK special intelligence services, Iraq fully and completely complied with the order to destroy WMDs, both chemical and nuclear (as well as precursors), to all reasonable degrees. They were literally turning in expired agar plates and empty 155mm casings in the 90s lol. Not exactly the happenings of a secret chemical agent running conspiracy. The closest you got was the post-1991 demolished ruins of the al-Muthana facility with, buried under hundreds of tons of collapsed concrete in storage bunkers and basement labs since Desert Storm, at most a few dozen sarin rockets and binary precusors for the same. This was confirmed when ISIS captured the ruins and began rooting around there.

Iraq was done as a quasi-religious crusade mostly, in an attempt to spread liberal democracy by bullets and bombs because the State Department had been reading a lot of Francis Fukuyama at the time combined with a childish understanding of WW2's aftermath, and the chemical weapons were just a very flimsy pretext for what amounted to the world's largest open air international relations/political science experiment. I suppose, had it succeeded, there would have been a war with China and Russia by now. They would also be European-esque liberal democracies, like Germany or Sweden or Massachusetts, today.

Reality is more often shaped by stupid people with misguided ideals than actual evil as actual evil is often too pragmatic to be dastardly.

Grey Havoc said:
A lot of things slipped through the cracks during previous administrations. Also, legitimate owners wouldn't necessarily have any idea that someone had cached hidden drones on their property, especially with regards as to remote or long disused properties. Complicating matters further, there are design concepts for drones that can burrow into the ground or otherwise be hidden under the surface (including bodies of water) and remain in sleep or standby mode for long periods that date all the way back to the Cold War. And that's even before we get to things like mobile mines.
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I guess if you can hide the drones in a barn you can also just use a helicopter gunship regiment. It'd take up less space.

Sferrin said:
Again, this doesn't mean it should be ignored.
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It won't be a problem in the future, given that the United States will likely be treated more like the Soviet Union in trade than anything else, as the EU and PRC are already building a prototypical Containment strategy to mitigate economic damages from American double dealing. Hard to store "drones in a barn" when your real estate and bond holdings were divested in favor of European, Australian, and Japanese equivalents.

The concept of attacking silos with drones is more likely going to come from America's own decline and increased internal security needs, as it becomes more akin to 1990's Russia, rather than a foreign power. Foreign countries are too wealthy to need to rely on such baroque and impractical methods. They have stealth bombers and glide bombs.

Historically the only things threatened by small, miniscule payload weapons are soft-skin equipment, such as aircraft and TELs. The U.S. has too many aircraft, except maybe portions of the B-2 force, to be attacked by a "drone swarm". The U.S. also doesn't use TELs. None of its nuclear weapons are vulnerable to drones, except maybe the NNSA warhead transporters, which are never attacked anyway.
 
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Could we stay on topic rather than drifting into science fiction and fantasy?
 
The big mistake IMO that the USAF made with the LGM-35 system is they decided to refurbish and upgrade the existing MMIII ground and launch infrastructure which turned out to be a very costly mistake due to it being state-of-the-art late 60s tech (The MMIII system came online in 1970). They just should've gone to building completely new ground and launch infrastructure instead of rebuilding woefully out of date obsolete crap.
 
NMaude said:
The big mistake IMO that the USAF made with the LGM-35 system is they decided to refurbish and upgrade the existing MMIII ground and launch infrastructure which turned out to be a very costly mistake due to it being state-of-the-art late 60s tech (The MMIII system came online in 1970). They just should've gone to building completely new ground and launch infrastructure instead of rebuilding woefully out of date obsolete crap.
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I think that part of it was that they knew the new missiles were going to be stupid-expensive and thought that the MM3 silos were in significantly better condition than they actually were.

So as a cost-saving measure, they wrote the RFP for a new missile only, no new silos or new comms wiring.

Even if the silos were in good enough shape to be reused, the comms wiring was not in good enough shape to reuse.
 
Scott Kenny said:
I think that part of it was that they knew the new missiles were going to be stupid-expensive and thought that the MM3 silos were in significantly better condition than they actually were.

So as a cost-saving measure, they wrote the RFP for a new missile only, no new silos or new comms wiring.

Even if the silos were in good enough shape to be reused, the comms wiring was not in good enough shape to reuse.
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The real problem is that this should all have taken place 20+ years ago.
 
Scott Kenny said:
I think that part of it was that they knew the new missiles were going to be stupid-expensive and thought that the MM3 silos were in significantly better condition than they actually were.

So as a cost-saving measure, they wrote the RFP for a new missile only, no new silos or new comms wiring.

Even if the silos were in good enough shape to be reused, the comms wiring was not in good enough shape to reuse.
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Even though it would've cost a lot of money a very detailed, thorough examination of the MMIII ground and launch infrastructure should've been conducted before such a decision was made.

bobbymike said:
The real problem is that this should all have taken place 20+ years ago.
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This! I suspect a lot of the reason why this never happened was due to a combination of this post-Cold War peace dividend nonsense and president Blowmonkey's bullshit war on terror diverting a LOT of military funding.
 
Desertfox said:
The missiles are actually the cheap part and we are not the only ones reusing old silos.
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America, however, are the only ones not refurbishing their silos on a periodic schedule. The last major deep modernization was REACT and AFAIK the MM3s still use 5.25" floppies for targeting upload. The US has the oldest and least functional launch infrastructure in the world, at present, and I suppose they would be tied with France if France had retained the S3s.

The nuclear triad is probably unaffordable given the twin problems of the deficit and need to cut costs, so the MM3s will likely be LEPed until the '50s, and be the first ICBM to see 100 years of continuous service. That or retired without replacement to feed B-21 and Columbia. New silos seems rather distant given Sentinel has already breached Nunn-McCurdy twice now.

A Midgetman 2 TEL, no need to be hard, and based in the missile fields followed by implosion of the silos would be the best case.

NMaude said:
Correct and I understand that the LGM-35A test-programme is on track.



True but the USAF doesn't seem to understand the concept of "False Economy".
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USAF never liked the strategic missile or space observation missions anyway. It's why USSF has had to crash budget for replacement of PAVE PAWS old mainframes and is trying to expedite like four new space based sensor platforms. Taking away their ICBMs so they can focus entirely on the strategic bomber mission would make them happy. Space Force can have them.
 
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