Lt. Gen. Andrew Gebara said that the Air Force’s plan to build fresh silos for the Sentinel ICBM will save time and cost, but that a small number may not fit on existing federal lands.
The Government Accountability Office’s annual weapon system assessment also found that the Air Force is moving to field a hypersonic attack cruise missile in 2027, despite delays driving a compressed flight testing schedule.
Knowing when to build on commercial systems and when to develop something new can be the difference between parity and information dominance.
A separate Boeing project to integrate a new radar on the B-52 Stratofortress bomber has also suffered a cost breach, said Air Force official Darlene Costello.
Key schedule dates to integrate a new radar into the Air Force’s B-52 fleet could be delayed by as much as a year, and a separate effort to deploy a ground-based radar is also experiencing schedule slips, the Pentagon’s top weapons tester found in a new report.
The company is expected to produce over 600 engines to breathe new life into the Air Force’s B-52 fleet, now expected to fly well into the 21st century.
“We have 141 bombers in the inventory,” said Air Force Gen. Thomas Bussiere. “The demand signal for the bombers is greater than any time I’ve seen in my career, across the fabric of every geographic combatant command.”
Why edge and endpoint security can’t be an afterthought.
The pricetag to put new engines on the decades-old bomber has jumped from $12.5 billion to $15 billion, while an effort to integrate a new radar has climbed to $3.3 billion from an original forecast of $2.3 billion, service officials revealed.
With only 20 bombers in the service’s fleet, that could translate to roughly $350 million in work per plane.
The new Mk21A reentry vehicle will be mounted atop the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile and will carry an updated nuclear warhead known as the W87-1.
“There's a lot that can go wrong on the program management side,” Col. Louis Ruscetta, senior materiel leader of the B-52 division, said of the bomber's upcoming modernization. “We have to try to manage and reduce what can go wrong."
The GPS network continues to prove its unmatched reliability, and it’s only getting stronger.
Rolls-Royce beat out General Electric and Pratt & Whitney, the latter of whom produced the TF33 engines currently used on the B-52.
A contract for one of three companies is "imminent," per top Air Force officials.
Supportability issues that affected the availability and performance of early, stealthy aircraft are being addressed by Northrop Grumman on this new program.
Advanced software development techniques are reducing risk and will enable the Air Force and Northrop Grumman to more efficiently integrate weapons on future aircraft, like the B-21.