The Bunker: The Pentagon’s Sentinel addiction
This week in The Bunker: The Pentagon’s recent decision to stick with the troubled new Sentinel ICBM program raises three questions: do we need it, how did its cost zoom, and why does it keep happening?; and more.
The Bunker, delivered to our subscribers Wednesdays at 7 a.m., is a newsletter from the desk of National Security Analyst Mark Thompson. Sign up here to receive it first thing, or check back Wednesday afternoon for the online version.
This week in The Bunker: The Pentagon’s recent decision to stick with the troubled new Sentinel ICBM program raises three questions: do we need it, how did its cost zoom, and why does it keep happening?; and more.
ADDICTED TO SENTINEL
It’s not fentanyl, but there are parallels
The Pentagon’s recent decision to stick with the new LGM-35A Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile — despite its redundancy and 81% cost growth since 2020 — meets The Bunker’s definition of addiction: a habitual act with deleterious, and potentially fatal, side effects.
Plus, Sentinel rhymes with fentanyl.
The nuclear triad, consisting of bombers, submarines, and land-based ICBMs, was a Cold War construct designed to hold U.S. warheads to Kremlin foreheads, just as Moscow did to Washington’s. But since the collapse of the Soviet Union more than 30 years ago, it has calcified into a relic that has been transmonsterfied into a U.S. military strategy to keep both Russia and China at bay. It’s a pact with two devils this time around, and it’s packed with all the problems inherent in any human enterprise, tripled.
The $140.9 billion Sentinel program is the latest poster child (it’s a big family) for everything wrong with Pentagon procurement. The Defense Department had to face the music in January when it acknowledged the program’s total cost, including development, had soared from $118 million per missile in 2020 to $162 million in January, a 37% increase. The ICBM faced cancellation unless the Pentagon said it was needed. Predictably, it did so on July 8, despite an even higher price tag. The cost per missile actually has jumped from $118 million to $214 million. But while the military insists it needs three ways of bombing foes back to the Stone Age, it came up with five reasons why Northrop’s Sentinel is too vital to scrap: it’s “essential,” there are “no alternatives,” its newly-calculated price tag is “reasonable,” it’s “a higher priority” than programs that will have to be cut to pay for it, and “adequate” tweaks have been made to “control” future cost hikes.
This all leads to a — ahem — triad of questions:
■ Do we need it?
Reasonable people can debate how vital the ICBM leg, its warheads buried in hundreds of silos in known locations across the Great Plains, is. More than 700 scientists said July 8 that it’s not needed. So do military heavyweights like former defense secretary William Perry, James Cartwright, a retired Marine general and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and retired Air Force general Lee Butler, who commanded the nation’s nuclear weapons. They contend its “use-it-or-lose-it” nature makes nuclear war, accidental or otherwise, more likely.
■ If we need it, how come we can’t do it right?
William LaPlante, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer, tried to explain the Sentinel’s rising cost. “Its scale, scope and complexity are something we haven’t attempted as a nation for over 60 years,” LaPlante said. That would lead a normal bureaucracy to be conservative in its approach.
But the Pentagon is an abnormal bureaucracy. “There are reasons for this cost growth, but there are also no excuses,” he added, citing the Pentagon’s perpetually rose-colored glasses. Of course, he didn’t use those precise words. Instead, he said, “the knowledge of the ground-based segment of this program was insufficient in hindsight to have a high-quality cost estimate,” which means the same thing.
LaPlante was joined by Andrew Hunter, the Air Force’s top civilian weapons buyer, and General James Silfe, the Air Force’s #2 officer. They said they have figured out the Sentinel’s problem (too big and too complicated) and know how to straighten it out (simplify and shrink). In fact, Hunter said, the Air Force recently created a “Nuclear Oversight Committee,” which is great news seeing as nuclear weapons have been around (July 16, 1945) longer than the Air Force (September 18, 1947).
The Pentagon looked at alternatives — including keeping the current Minuteman fleet operating until 2070 — but they “didn’t meet the operational requirements that the warfighter had levied on us,” LaPlante said. So much for civilian control of the military.
After LaPlante chided the Air Force for its lack of foresight, the two Air Force officials thanked him for showing them the error of their ways. “The Department of the Air Force really concurs with Dr. LaPlante’s decision that a restructured Sentinel program is the best way to meet the essential national security requirements of sustaining our nuclear deterrent,” Hunter said. “Hey, Dr. LaPlante,” Slife chimed in, “just want to say thanks to you and your team for the thorough review of the Sentinel program that you did.” Basically, they committed rhetorical hari-kari.
■ Why does this keep happening?
The U.S. military is always eyeballing threats decades down the road. It thinks it sees potential foes building flawless new war machines. That leads to too much not-ready-for-prime-time technology being crowbarred into fledgling U.S. platforms. That invariably delays their development and boosts their costs. Critics have been railing about this for decades. But it never changes.
Yet systems aren’t the real problem. It’s the decisions made by people developing them that need fixing. Of course, as is all too typical, LaPlante, Hunter, and Slife weren’t running things when the Pentagon gave the go-ahead for the Sentinel’s development in 2020.
Ellen Lord was in LaPlante’s seat. Before assuming her Defense Department post, she ran Textron Systems. While she was at the Pentagon, her former employer landed the contract to build the re-entry system that’s going to go atop the Sentinel. William Roper had Hunter’s job in 2020, and praised the Sentinel as an opportunity “to inject innovation … to stay ahead of our adversaries.” Slife’s counterpart back then was Stephen Wilson, who now sits on the board of BAE Systems. The company won a $12 billion Sentinel support contract in 2022 (the loser is protesting the award). The Bunker isn’t suggesting there are conflicts of interest here. It’s just that the revolving door spins so fast between the Pentagon and the industry it succors that sometimes it’s tough to tell who’s calling the shots.
Finally, The Bunker was disappointed that none of his former reporting colleagues at the briefing asked about Air Force Colonel Charles Clegg. He had been fired as chief of the Sentinel program 15 days earlier because the Air Force said he “did not follow organizational procedures.” Was he a poor manager, or a lamb sacrificed on the altar of organizational procedures? Or both? It surely would have made for a far meatier briefing if his superiors had ordered him to be the skunk at this dog and pony show.
WHAT WE’RE READING
Here’s what has caught The Bunker’s eye recently
→ Boo!
Vladimir Putin’s greatest weapon remains the scare tactic, the U.S. Army’s former top officer in Europe told The Cipher Brief July 11.
Russia is thwarting U.S. precision weapons Washington has given Ukraine, Yaroslav Trofimov reported in the Wall Street Journal July 10.
…but sailors aboard a recently refurbished carrier will have some new creature comforts, USNI News reported July 11.
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Pulitzer Prize-winner Mark Thompson, a national security analyst for the Center for Defense Information at POGO, has been covering the Pentagon for more than 45 years.
