“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. By 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.
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