WASHINGTON (AP) — The new Sentinel nuclear warhead program is 81% over budget and is now estimated to cost nearly $141 billion, but the Pentagon is moving forward with the program, saying that given the threats from China and Russia it does not have a choice.
The Northrop Grumman Sentinel program is the first major upgrade to the ground-based component of the nuclear triad in more than 60 years and will replace the aging Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile.
It involves not only building a new missile but the modernization of 450 silos across five states, their launch control centers, three nuclear missile bases and several other testing facilities.
The expansiveness of the program previously raised questions from government watchdogs as to whether the Pentagon could manage it all.
Military budget officials on Monday said when they set the program’s estimated costs their full knowledge of the modernization needed “was insufficient in hindsight to have a high-quality cost estimate,” Bill LaPlante, under secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, told reporters on a call.
The high cost overrun triggered what is known as a Nunn-McCurdy breach, which occurs if the cost of developing a new program increases by 25% or more. By statute, the under secretary of defense for acquisition then must **undertake a rigorous review of the program to determine if it should continue; otherwise the program must be terminated. **
The old nukes are very, very old. MAD doesn’t work if people question if your weapons actually still work. They need an update.
The way military contracts work doesn’t sound like it’s working anymore either
In what way? Them coming out more than expected? That isn’t a new thing, in fact I would say it is the norm for basically all contracts, and not just military ones.
Maybe I’m overly cynical, but it being “only” 81% over budget makes me pleasantly surprised.
There was a really good freakonomics podcast episode about that! https://freakonomics.com/podcast/heres-why-all-your-projects-are-always-late-and-what-to-do-about-it-rebroadcast/
The article explains that the scope of work was so big it was very hard to make a real estimate.
I can imagine that they also probably didn’t agree to use a contractor who made a more realistic estimation.
Well I mean it’s not like there’s hundreds of thousands of Americans with crippling food insecurity, no homes, no healthcare, inadequate wages, poisonous water, and/or gun violence; so the government is fine making sure it has the capacity it nearly exterminate the human race. Right guys?
What a fucking waste of our taxes
Why?
Nukes don’t just disappear. We’ve got loads. We don’t need to be constantly making more.
They have devices in them that break over time as all devices do, and those devices have parts and designs that were contemporary before the people working on them today were alive likely with architectural and design decisions that were operationally required back when things were being drafted that no longer make sense to do today. Likely the nuclear materials will be reused, but that’s me thinking with my brainbox and not actually a thing I know.
For an example of what happens when we continue to rely on tech that really deserves to be updated and/or replaced, see the United States banking sector as compared to basically everywhere else.
They kinda do, the reason no one bothers to find nukes lost back in the 50s is because they arent nukes anymore, hell they may not even be explosive. Half life means that the nukes just kinda become not nukes after awhile.
I’ll go against the grain as a liberal leftist and say 141 billion for upgrading our entire nuclear infrastructure in today’s political climate seems like a deal.
I really hope they dont make enough to blow the whole planet again. Cold war quantity of nukes was absurd…unless Rodan shows up or something.
This isn’t the program to produce more warheads. It’s the program to update the missile force silos and rockets. Which was really needed.
Really needed for what exactly? To exterminate all life on the planet a few minutes faster?
As dumb as it sounds, mutually assured destruction does have the perk of keeping everyone from using nukes. If modern countermeasures prevent that, it isnt a deterrent anymore. Updating these nukes improves the likelihood we dont have to use them.
Relevant example: russias tanks. They are outdated and weren’t adequately improved over decades. and are now getting wrecked by consumer grade drones and guys with while fancy, in all honesty, second grade hand me down rocket launchers. Before we knew this fact, they were a reasonable deterrent to not fucking with russia. Now, not so much.
Yeah I just mean we need to scale back What we update. Blowing the planet half way is enough.
You misunderstand, like a half dozen of the current high yield mirv ones could end most life on earth. This is just making them faster and as always the Pentagon lied and got caught.
