FE WARREN AIR FORCE BASE, Wyo. — The control stations for America's intercontinental ballistic missiles have a sort of retro '80s look, with computer panels in seafoam green, dim lighting and chunky control switches, including a critical switch that says “launch.”
These underground capsules are about to be demolished and the missile silos they control will be completely overhauled. A new nuclear missile is coming, a gigantic ICBM called the Sentinel. It's the biggest cultural shift in the land portion of the Air Force's nuclear missile mission in six decades.
But there are questions about whether some Cold War aspects of the Minuteman missiles that the Sentinel will replace should be changed.
Making the silo-launched missile more modern, with complex software and 21st-century connectivity across a vast network, could also mean it is more vulnerable. The Sentinel will need to be well protected against cyber attacks, while the technology will have to deal with frigid winter temperatures in the western states where the silos are located.
The $96 billion Sentinel overhaul includes 450 silos across five states, their control centers, three nuclear missile bases and several other testing facilities. The project is so ambitious that it raises the question of whether the Air Force can do it all at once.
An overhaul is needed.
The silos are losing power. Their 60 year old solid mechanical parts often break down. Air Force crews guard them with helicopters dating back to the Vietnam War. Commanders hope that modernizing the Sentinel, as well as its trucks, equipment and living quarters, will help attract and retain young technology-savvy service members, who are now being asked every day to find ways to keep a very old system running. .
Nuclear weapons modernization was delayed for years as the United States postponed spending on new missiles, bombers and submarines to support its post-September 11 wars abroad. Now everything is being modernized at once. The Sentinel work is one part of a larger $750 billion overhaul of a nuclear weapons company that will replace nearly every element of America's nuclear defense, including new stealth bombers, submarines and ICBMs in the nation's largest nuclear weapons program since Manhattan Project.
For the Sentinel, prime contractor Northrop Grumman could begin silo work as early as 2025. That's 80 years after the US last used nuclear weapons in war, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, killing an estimated 100,000 people. immediately and probably tens of thousands more over time.
For the Pentagon, there are expectations that the modern Sentinel will cope with the threats from rapidly evolving Chinese and Russian missile systems. The Sentinel is expected to remain in use 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 risk.
“Sentinel is a software-intensive program with a compressed schedule,” the Government Accountability Office reported this summer. “Software development carries a high level of risk due to its size and complexity and the unique requirements of the nuclear deterrent mission.”
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has acknowledged the challenges facing the program.
“It's been a long time since we've done an ICBM,” Kendall said at a Center for New American Security event in Washington in November. It is “in some ways the largest thing the Air Force has ever taken on.”
“Sentinel is having a bit of a hard time, I think, to be honest,” he said.
By far the biggest cultural shift the Sentinel will bring is connectivity for everyone who secures, maintains, operates and supports the system. The overhaul touches almost everything, including new equipment for military chefs who cook for the missile teams. The changes could improve efficiency and quality of life at the bases, but could also create vulnerabilities that analog Minuteman missiles have never faced.
Since the first silo-based Minuteman was placed on alert at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana, on October 27, 1962—the day Cuba shot down a U-2 spy plane at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis—the missile has been “talking” to its operators through thousands of kilometers of wiring in underground cables.
These Hardened Intersite Cable Systems, or HICS, cables carry messages back and forth from the missile to the missile, which receives these messages via a relatively new part of the capsule – a fire control console called REACT, for rapid execution and combat targeting, which was introduced halfway through the installed in the nineties.
It's a closed communication loop, and a very secure one that comes with its own headaches. Every time the Air Force wants to test one of the missiles, it has to literally dig up the cables and connect them, isolating that test missile's wiring from the rest. After decades of testing, hundreds of junctions are now present in these critical loops.
But it's also one of the Minuteman's best features. You'll need a shovel – and a whole lot more – to try to hack the system. Even when rocket crews update the target codes, it is a mechanical, manual process.
Minuteman is “a very cyber-resilient platform,” said Col. Charles Clegg, program manager of the Sentinel system.
Clegg said that for the software-driven Sentinel, cybersecurity has been a top focus of the program, one that has all their attention.
“Like Minuteman, Sentinel will still operate within a closed network. However, to provide defense in depth, we will implement additional security measures at the border and within the network, allowing our weapon system to operate effectively in a cyber-contested environment,” Clegg said.
Those who maintain the Minuteman III have tried to implement new technology over the years to make maintenance more efficient, but they 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 icy conditions. temperatures.
Nuclear missile fields are located in Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota and Wyoming. Those rockets require maintenance even in winter, and crews spend hours outside in sub-zero field conditions.
“An iPad is not going to survive the Montana winter” at the launch sites, where maintenance personnel have been working outside in temperatures of minus 20 degrees or even minus 40 degrees, said Chief Master Sergeant Virgil Castro, the 741st Missile Maintenance Squadron senior enlisted leader. .
When maintenance crews in Malmstrom tested some radio frequency identification, or RFID, technology (think of the way seaports track items in cargo containers) a security problem arose.
“Today everything is connected to the Internet of Things. And you might have a back door there that you don't even know about,” said Lt. Col. Todd Yehle, 741st Maintenance Squadron commander. “You can't hack those systems with the old analog systems.”
What it means is that even though technology could automate the entire operations process, one crucial aspect of the rocket launch will remain the same. When the day comes when another nuclear weapon has to be fired, it will still be teams of rocket launchers who validate the orders and trigger a launch.
“It's the human being aware,” said Col. Johnny Galbert, commander of the 90th Missile Wing at FE Warren. “I think it comes down to we want to trust that our pilots, our young officers out there, are making that decision, that we are able to interpret what higher headquarters is telling them or telling them to do.” ___
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