Air Force upgrade: gigantic Sentinel missile to replace Cold War tech

The control stations for America’s nuclear ICBMs have a sort of retro ’80s look, with seafoam green computer panels, poor lighting, and chunky control switches, including a critical one that says “launch.” .

Those underground capsules are about to be demolished and the missile silos they control will be completely overhauled. A new nuclear missile is approaching, a gigantic intercontinental ballistic missile called Sentinel. It’s the biggest cultural shift in the land-based leg of the Air Force’s nuclear missile mission in 60 years.

But there are questions about whether some of the Cold War-era aspects of the Minuteman missiles that will replace the Sentinel should be changed.

Making the silo-launched missile more modern, with complex software and 21st-century connectivity across a vast network, may also mean it is more vulnerable. The Sentinel will need to be well protected from cyberattacks, while its technology will have to cope with the frigid winter temperatures in the western states where the silos are located.

The $96 billion Sentinel overhaul involves 450 silos in five states, their control centers, three nuclear missile bases and several other testing facilities. The project is so ambitious that it has raised questions about whether the Air Force will be able to do it all at once.

A review is needed.

The silos lose power. Its huge mechanical parts, 60 years old, frequently break down. Air Force crews protect them using helicopters that date back to the Vietnam War. Commanders hope modernizing the Sentinel — and the trucks, equipment and housing — will help attract and retain young, technology-minded service members who are now asked every day to find ways to keep a system running. very old.

Nuclear modernization was delayed for years because the United States deferred spending on new missiles, bombers and submarines to support post-9/11 wars abroad. Now everything is being modernized at the same time. Sentinel’s work is one part of a broader overhaul of the entire $750 billion nuclear weapons enterprise, which is replacing nearly every component of America’s nuclear defenses, including new stealth bombers, submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles in the country’s largest nuclear weapons program since the Manhattan Project.

For the Sentinel, prime contractor Northrop Grumman could begin working in silos as early as 2025. This is 80 years after the United States last used nuclear weapons in war, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, which They killed about 100,000 people instantly and probably tens of thousands more over time.

For the Pentagon, there are expectations that the modern Sentinel will confront threats from rapidly evolving Chinese and Russian missile systems. The Sentinel is expected to remain in service until 2075, so designers are taking an approach that will make it easier to upgrade with new technologies in the coming years. But that is not without risks.

“Sentinel is a software-intensive program with a compressed schedule,” the Government Accountability Office reported this summer. “Software development is high risk due to its scale, complexity and unique nuclear deterrence mission requirements.”

Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall acknowledged the challenges facing the program.

“It’s been a long time since we’ve made an ICBM,” Kendall said in November at a Center for a New American Security event in Washington. It’s “the most important thing, in some ways, that the Air Force has ever taken on.”

“I think Sentinel, honestly, is struggling a little bit,” he said.

New connections

By far the biggest cultural change that Sentinel will bring is connectivity for all those who secure, maintain, operate and support the system. The revision affects almost everything, including new equipment for military chefs who cook for missile teams. The changes could improve efficiency and quality of life on bases, but they may also create vulnerabilities that analog Minuteman missiles have never faced.

Since the first silo-based Minuteman went on alert at Montana’s Malmstrom Air Force Base on October 27, 1962 – the day Cuba shot down a U-2 spy plane at the height of the Cuban missiles – the missile has “talked” to its operators through thousands of kilometers of wiring in cables buried underground.

Those Hardened Intersite Cable Systems, or HICS, cables carry messages back and forth from the missile to the missileer, who receives those messages through a relatively new part of the capsule: a fire control console called REACT, for Rapid Execution and Combat Target Selection, which was installed in the mid-1990s.

It is a closed and very secure communication circuit that brings its own headaches. Every time the Air Force wants to test one of the missiles, it literally has to dig up the wires and splice them together, to isolate the wiring of that test missile from the rest. After decades of testing, there are now hundreds of splices in those critical loops.

But it’s also one of the Minuteman’s best features. You would need a shovel (and a lot more) to try to hack the system. Even when missile crews update targeting codes, it is a manual and mechanical process.

Minuteman is “a very cyber-resilient platform,” said Col. Charles Clegg, Sentinel system program manager.

Clegg said cybersecurity for the software-powered Sentinel has been a major focus of the program, one that draws his full attention.

“Like Minuteman, Sentinel will continue to operate within a closed network. However, to provide defense in depth, we will have additional security measures at the edge and within the network, allowing our weapons system to operate effectively in a cyber contested environment,” Clegg said.

frozen fields

Those who maintain the Minuteman III have tried over the years to incorporate new technology to make maintenance more efficient, but have found that sometimes the old manual way of keeping track of things (sometimes literally with a folder and a pen) is better. , especially in cold climates. temperatures.

Nuclear missile fields are located in Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota and Wyoming. Those missiles need maintenance even in winter, and crews spend hours outdoors in subzero field conditions.

“An iPad will not survive the Montana winter” at launch sites, where maintenance crews have worked outdoors in temperatures of -20 degrees or even -40 degrees, said Chief Master Sgt. Virgil Castro, senior enlisted leader of the 741st Missile Maintenance Squadron.

Additionally, when Malmstrom’s maintenance teams tested some radio frequency identification, or RFID, technology (think about how seaports track items inside cargo containers), security vulnerabilities were created.

“Today everything is connected to the internet of things. And you may have a backdoor that you don’t even know about,” said Lt. Col. Todd Yehle, commander of the 741st Maintenance Squadron. “With the old analog systems, you’re not hacking into those systems.”

What it means is that although technology could automate the entire operations process, one critical aspect of missile launches will remain the same. If the day comes when another nuclear weapon needs to be fired, there will still be missile teams validating the orders and activating a launch.

“It’s the human being in the loop,” said Col. Johnny Galbert, commander of the 90th Missile Wing at FE Warren. “I think what it comes down to is we want to trust our Airmen, our young officers, to make that decision, to be able to interpret what higher headquarters tells them or orders them to do.”

This story was reported by The Associated Press. The AP receives support for nuclear security coverage from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Outrider Foundation.