Pentagon’s Rehab of Nuclear-Missile Arsenal Hit by Soaring Costs

livemint.com:

The projected cost of replacing the aging nuclear missiles buried in silos across the Great Plains has soared by more than a third to $107 billion, the Pentagon said, a development that comes as China pushes ahead with an expansion of its arsenal. The problems at one of its priority programs put more pressure on the Pentagon’s funding for other programs as it wrestles with the prospect of cuts over the next several years unless Congress can agree on a broader budget deal.

The Pentagon in a statement cited poor budget forecasting, supply-chain challenges and pandemic-driven inflation for a 37% increase in costs for the highly classified Air Force program, known as Sentinel. The surge has triggered an automatic review by the Defense Department and Congress, either of which could terminate the program.

The Pentagon had already planned to spend an estimated $756 billion over the next 10 years to maintain and upgrade its nuclear forces, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Russia and China’s expansions of their own nuclear arsenals have lent urgency to these long-delayed improvements.

That spending includes replacing the Cold War-era Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles with Sentinel, launching a fleet of new missile-carrying Columbia-class submarines, and upgrading nuclear warheads and the communications systems tying them to the president, who has ultimate authority on their use. Separately, in the third element of the so-called nuclear triad, bombers, the Pentagon has begun building the B-21—a futuristic flying-wing plane intended to fly thousands of miles to strike targets deep behind enemy lines.