Kratos SRE Inc., a subsidiary of Kratos Defense, and Halo Aeronautics are among the more than two dozen vendors taking part in the first phase of the Defense Department’s Drone Dominance Program, the department said in a statement.

“Drone dominance is a process race as much as a technological race,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a July 2025 memo that the department highlighted. “We are buying what works — fast, at scale, and without bureaucratic delay. Lethality will not be hindered by self-imposed restrictions.”

Hegseth’s memo followed a June 2025 executive order signed by President Donald Trump that spelled out ways for the U.S. to improve its military and commercial drone capabilities, focusing on inexpensive, American-made combat drones.

The evaluation for the first phase, which the DOD dubbed the Gauntlet, will start Feb. 18 at Fort Benning, Georgia, and finish in early March. After military operators fly and evaluate the proposed vendors’ systems, the department will place about $150 million in orders for prototype drones.

Those prototypes will be delivered over the following five months, per the DOD. The department said in an early December release that it planned to have 12 vendors produce a total of 30,000 drones, at $5,000 per unit.

Hegseth’s Drone Dominance Program, which was rolled out in early December with a request for information, aims to quickly and inexpensively acquire hundreds of thousands of one-way attack drones by 2027.

Ukraine has used such “kamikaze” drones extensively in its fight against Russia’s invasion over the last four years, and it has drawn attention to their effectiveness in a modern war.

Hegseth said in December that the military can’t afford to continue to use costly munitions worth millions of dollars apiece to take out inexpensive enemy drones, and that a cheaper arsenal of attack drones is critical.

The Pentagon expects to spend $1.1 billion on the program over its four phases and wants to have “warfighters” be the ones evaluating how well potential drones work.

The department intends to buy large amounts of drones on a regular schedule, which will create a stable demand signal allowing industry to build out its own capacity.

The following three phases will see the number of vendors decline from 12 to 5, the DOD said in December, as the number of drones ordered will grow to 150,000 and the price will drop to $2,300.

The competitive cycles for improving these drones will be “measured in months, not years,” the Pentagon said.

The companies competing in “Gauntlet I” are:

• Anno.Ai Inc.
• Ascent Aerosystems Inc.
• Auterion Government Solutions Inc.
• DZYNE Technologies
• Ewing Aerospace
• Farage Precision
• Firestorm Labs
• General Cherry Corp.
• Greensight Inc.
• Griffon Aerospace Inc.
• Halo Aeronautics
• Kratos SRE
• Modalai Inc.
• Napatree Technology
• Neros Inc.
• Oksi Ventures Inc.
• Paladin Defense Services
• Performance Drone Works
• Responsibly LTD
• Swarm Defense Technologies
• Teal Drones Inc.
• Ukrainian Defense Drones Tech Corp.
• Vector Defense Inc.
• W.S. Darley & Co.
• XTEND Reality Inc.

In materials released Monday, the House Appropriations Committee said the compromise $839 billion spending bill would provide $3.9 billion for the military’s sixth-generation aircraft. That would include $3 billion for the Air Force’s F-47 fighter, which will be built by Boeing, and $972 million for the Navy’s F/A-XX, the House committee said.

That would be hundreds of millions more than the Pentagon requested in its original proposed 2026 budget last summer, which requested nearly $2.6 billion for the F-47 and just $74 million for the Navy’s F/A-XX.

The F-47, also known as Next Generation Air Dominance, will be an advanced fighter designed to replace the F-22 Raptor. It is intended to fly alongside multiple autonomous drone wingmen, called collaborative combat aircraft, and have advanced stealth capabilities and greater range than the F-22 and F-35.

The spending bill also would prevent the Air Force from canceling its E-7 Wedgetail airborne battle management aircraft program.

While top service leaders had for years stressed the need to acquire the Boeing-made E-7 to replace the aging E-3 Sentry, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth expressed skepticism about the program’s future use in a June 2025 hearing and suggested a space-based system would be better. When the Pentagon’s budget proposal emerged later that month, it called for canceling the E-7, which is already flown by Australia and in the works for other allies.

Congressional appropriators appear to disagree. The House said the spending bill would provide $1.1 billion for the E-7 program.

The spending bill would also be in line with the Pentagon’s proposed reduction in the number of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters purchased in 2026. The Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps combined bought 75 F-35s from Lockheed Martin in 2025. But the Pentagon’s proposed budget called for 47 F-35s in all in 2026, including 24 F-35As for the Air Force.

The conferenced defense bill would provide $7.6 billion for 47 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, across those three services. It would also provide $440 million for spare parts for both the F-35 and its engine, the F135.

The Pentagon said last summer that it planned to redirect money that would have gone to buying more F-35s into sustainment of the jets and strengthening its supply base, as well as ensuring its Block 4 upgrades stay on track.

Block 4 upgrades will allow the F-35 to carry more weapons, improve its electronic warfare capabilities and upgrade its sensors, communications and navigation. But the effort is years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget, and the F-35 program has scaled back its plans for those upgrades to focus on the capabilities that can be delivered in the next five years.

The defense spending bill would boost spending on the EA-37B Compass Call electronic warfare aircraft by $474 million, to buy two more of the planes.

And it would provide $1.9 billion for the B-21 Raider, Northrop Grumman’s sixth-generation stealth bomber.

The spending bill would also provide $27.2 billion for the Navy to build 17 ships, including a Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine, two Virginia-class fast attack subs, three medium landing ships and an anti-submarine warfare ship, the House said. The Senate said the conference bill increases spending on Columbia- and Virginia-class subs by $5.9 billion.

The bill also fully funds the Air Force’s LGM-35A Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile program.

Google Cloud’s Gemini for Government is the first AI capability to be launched on GenAI.mil, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a video posted on social media Tuesday.

“The future of American warfare is here, and it’s spelled AI,” Hegseth said in the video.

“This platform [GenAI.mil] puts the world’s most powerful frontier AI models, starting with Google Gemini, directly into the hands of every American warrior,” he said.

Users must have a common access card from the department to log onto GenAI.mil; it cannot be accessed by unauthorized personnel.

Hegseth said the department is not “sitting idly by” as adversaries take advantage of rapid technological advancements.

“At the click of a button, AI models on GenAI can be utilized to conduct deep research, format documents and even analyze video or imagery at unprecedented speed,” Hegseth said in the video.

In a written statement also released Tuesday by the Pentagon, Hegseth said the department is “pushing all of our chips in on artificial intelligence as a fighting force.”

The Pentagon also said its AI work followed President Donald Trump’s July order “to achieve an unprecedented level of AI technological superiority.”

Gemini for Government will use “intelligent agentic workflows,” or AI processes where autonomous programming makes decisions and takes actions with minimal human involvement, and will allow defense personnel to experiment more with these capabilities, the department said.

“There is no prize for second place in the global race for AI dominance,” Emil Michael, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, said in a statement. “We are moving rapidly to deploy powerful AI capabilities like Gemini for Government directly to our workforce. AI is America’s next Manifest Destiny, and we’re ensuring that we dominate this new frontier.”

Elon Musk’s xAI, Anthropic and OpenAI are some of the other AI programs the department has considered to help with national security missions. Intelligence analysis, logistics and data collection are some of the duties that the department hopes could be improved by using AI.

The Pentagon said it will provide free training to all department employees on how to use the GenAI.mil website. Those training sessions are meant to build employees’ confidence in using AI tools, and teach them how to use those capabilities to their greatest potential.

The department stressed the need for security when using this program, and said all tools on the GenAI website will be considered controlled unclassified information, or CUI, and secured well enough to be used operationally.

Gemini for Government is web-grounded against Google Search to keep the information it produces accurate and dramatically reduce “the risk of AI hallucinations.”

The Pentagon said its Office of Research and Engineering’s AI Rapid Capabilities Cell led to the development of these capabilities.

The ICBM, which was equipped with multiple targeted reentry vehicles, launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at about 11 p.m. Pacific time. It then flew about 4,200 miles, at roughly 15,000 miles per hour, to a ballistic missile test site in the Marshall Islands’ Kwajalein Atoll.

Sensors at that facility, the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site, collected radar, optical and telemetry data in the missile’s terminal phase to evaluate how well it performed.

Airmen from the 625th Strategic Operations Squadron from Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska launched the missile using an airborne launch control system aboard a Navy E-6B Mercury aircraft. The missile was selected at random from missiles based at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, transported more than 1,300 miles to Vandenberg and then reassembled for the test launch.

“These tests are demonstrative of what striker airmen bring to the fight if called by the president,” Global Strike Commander Gen. Thomas Bussiere said. “An airborne launch validates the survivability of our ICBMs, which serve as the strategic backstop of our nation’s defense and defense of allies and partners.”

The Air Force said these tests, which have been carried out more than 300 times, are routinely done to show the U.S. nuclear deterrent is safe, secure, reliable and effective. Tuesday’s test was not motivated by current world events, the Air Force said.

The U.S. has about 400 nuclear-armed Minuteman III missiles based in 450 silos across Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, Colorado and Nebraska. But those ICBMs are more than 50 years old and nearing the end of their lives. The Air Force is planning to replace the Minuteman III arsenal with the LGM-35A Sentinel in the 2030s. The Sentinel program, however, is beset by rising anticipated future costs and the Air Force is looking for ways to bring the price down.

Even a “reasonably modified” version of the Northrop Grumman-made Sentinel will likely cost $140.9 billion, 81% more than the program’s original cost estimate of $77.7 billion, the Pentagon said in a statement. If Sentinel continues on its current path without being modified, the likely cost will be about $160 billion, it said.

And the military expects restructuring the program will delay it by several years.

“There are reasons for this cost growth, but there are also no excuses,” William LaPlante, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, said in a conference call with reporters on Monday. “We fully appreciate the magnitude of the costs, but we also understand the risks of not modernizing our nuclear forces and not addressing the very real threats we confront.”

The Sentinel is intended to replace the Air Force’s half-century old Minuteman III nuclear missile, which is nearing the end of its life. In January, the Air Force announced Sentinel’s future costs were projected to run over budget severely enough to trigger a review process known as a critical Nunn-McCurdy breach.

Such a review can sometimes lead to a program being canceled. LaPlante said Monday he decided to proceed with Sentinel after concluding it met several criteria, including that it is essential to national security and there were no cheaper alternatives that would meet the military’s operational requirements.

Big changes are coming for Sentinel, however. LaPlante rescinded the program’s Milestone B approval, which in September 2020 authorized the program to move into its engineering and manufacturing development phase. He also ordered the Air Force to restructure the program to address the root causes of the cost overruns and make sure it has the right management structure to keep its future price down.

The per-unit total cost for Sentinel was originally $118 million in 2020, when its cost, schedule and performance goals were set. When the Nunn-McCurdy breach was announced in January, those per-unit costs had grown at least 37% to about $162 million.

Hunter said the per-unit cost for the revised Sentinel program — which include components in addition to its missiles — is estimated to be about $214 million. He said the estimates from the Pentagon’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation, or CAPE, office came with a 50% confidence level, meaning the costs could end up higher or lower.

Andrew Hunter, the Air Force’s assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, said he agreed with LaPlante’s decision and pledged to draw up a plan for restructuring Sentinel over the next few months and get to a new Milestone B approval. The entire process for revising the program and getting the Pentagon to approve its new plan, cost and schedule will likely take 18 to 24 months, Hunter said.

Command and launch

LaPlante and Hunter said most of the projected overruns are coming from Sentinel’s command and launch segment, which will include its missile silos and accompanying launch control centers where airmen operate the ICBMs. Revamping that segment will be a major part of the Air Force’s cost control effort, they said, as well as improving its systems engineering and changing how its contract is structured.

LaPlante said changes will include a “scaling back” of the launch facilities to make them smaller, simpler and more cost-effective. Paring down the launch facilities will also shorten the timeline needed to transition from the existing Minuteman III system and the new Sentinel facilities, he said.

Hunter said the new Sentinel facilities will need more communications infrastructure beyond the 7,500 miles of copper cabling now in use for the Minuteman silos and launch centers. The Air Force’s planned modifications to Sentinel include more affordable ways to do that work, he said.

In a statement, Northrop Grumman said it “is making important progress on this highly complex weapon system,” and continuing to achieve milestones to mature its design and reduce risk to prepare for production and deployment in the future.

Northrop said those milestones include designing and developing Sentinel’s facilities, support equipment and missile, and tests of components such as its nose cone and three booster stages.

“We continue to perform and meet our commitments under the EMD contract as we move toward delivery of this essential national security capability,” Northrop Grumman said.

LaPlante said that in “hindsight,” the department didn’t originally have enough information on how complicated Sentinel’s ground-based systems would be to accurately estimate its costs. In the nearly four years since, the Pentagon has much better information on hand, he said.

The Air Force also set up a committee chaired by its most senior leaders to oversee its nuclear enterprise, including its bombers, ICBMs and command-and-control, Hunter said. And the department dedicated a program executive officer to be in charge of ICBMs, set up a Nuclear Systems Center, and is changing the leadership of the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center from a two-star general to a three-star general, he said.

Hunter said the Air Force will “do what it takes to sustain Minuteman III to meet these warfighter requirements in the interim.”

Gen. Jim Slife, the Air Force’s vice chief of staff, said Sentinel’s cost growth is not expected to kick in during the next five years, and the hardest choices on what to cut won’t be made until after the program’s new baseline is set.

“It is a decision for down the road, to decide what trade offs we’re going to need to make,” Slife said.

The department in February announced a sweeping shake-up of the Air Force and Space Force to better prepare them for a potential conflict with China, which the department calls a “reoptimization for great power competition.”

The changes would include the creation of an Integrated Capabilities Command, led by a three-star general, which would take charge of identifying the Air Force’s future requirements. The Air Force would also revamp some existing organizations such as Air Combat Command as well as Air Education and Training Command; shift how airmen, units and equipment deploy; and improve training.

But in a summary of the compromise version of the fiscal 2024 Defense Appropriations Act, publicly released Thursday, lawmakers said the Air Force hasn’t thoroughly explained why the reorganization is necessary, how the service would implement it and what budget is required. Lawmakers say they need such information to properly assess the department’s plans.

The bill would require Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall to explain any organizational changes to congressional defense committees, 30 days before they go into effect. Lawmakers would also want Kendall to explain how such a change would differ from the existing structure; a breakdown of the phases of the reorganization; what each phase would cost; a description of the new offices, commands or centers it would require; how this would affect service members and civilian employees; and the programmatic effects of the planned change.

When asked for comment, the Air Force said it plans to keep lawmakers informed about its reorganization.

“As the Department of the Air Force develops implementation plans, leaders will continue to share information with congressional staffs,” Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek said in an email to Defense News.

The Government Accountability Office would also have send the House and Senate defense appropriations subcommittees a report within six months on the Air Force’s planned reorganization. This report would have to detail factors and analysis the service considered for the revamp, what feedback combatant commanders offered, how much it might cost, how long it might take to put into place and how the reorganization might be deemed a success.

GAO would also have to describe how recommendations from the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution Commission were taken into account, and how the reorganization might affect joint and coalition forces.

Kendall told reporters at a budget briefing earlier this month that the revamp would likely not cost a great deal of money.

“What we’re talking about with the re-optimization is creating some new organizations, but they will be created out of pieces that we already have,” Kendall said. “We’re not talking about big manpower increases, and we’re going to minimize, [to] the extent we can, the movement of people … the acquisition of real estate, and so on.”

“We’re having a hard time with [the E-7 program], getting price agreement with Boeing,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told reporters in a roundtable at the Air and Space Force Association’s Air Warfare Symposium here. “We’re still in negotiations with them, and that’s not been finalized yet.”

The Air Force plans to buy 26 E-7s from Boeing by 2032 to replace its aging E-3 Sentry airborne warning and control system aircraft fleet. The service awarded Boeing a $1.2 billion contract in February 2023 to start working on the aircraft.

The service plans to first buy two rapid prototype E-7s, with the first expected to be fielded in 2027, and in 2025 make a production decision on the rest of the fleet.

Australia already flies the E-7, which it refers to as the Wedgetail, and Boeing is also making the aircraft for other nations such as the United Kingdom. The Air Force’s version of the E-7 will have a modified design to meet U.S. satellite communication, military GPS and cybersecurity and program protection requirements.

“We’re partnering with the US Air Force to deliver this critical capability and are working diligently to reach an agreement,” Boeing said in a statement to Defense News.

Andrew Hunter, the Air Force’s assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, said in another roundtable the sticky negotiations center on the E-7′s first two rapid prototype aircraft.

The level of engineering work needed to adapt the E-7 to the Air Force’s specifications was “above and beyond what we anticipated,” Hunter said.

“The big surprise there was an unexpected amount and degree of non-recurring engineering required to meet the requirement that the Air Force specified, which we thought was very close to what the U.K. is currently procuring from Boeing,” Hunter said. “Those discussions have been challenging.”

Hunter said the Air Force is trying to better understand Boeing’s proposal and determine what elements are essential, and what are unnecessary or could be deferred. The service has narrowed those nagging issues down to a smaller list, Hunter said, but he declined to detail them.

Hunter said he would prefer the process to be going faster. But he acknowledged it’s not surprising that Boeing is being particularly cautious as it negotiates on this program, and that the Air Force and Boeing are working through these challenges together.

“They’ve gotten into some contracts in the past that it’s apparent that as they were bidding those, there was key information they were lacking,” Hunter said. “At some level, it’s not that surprising that they’re trying hard to do their homework and not bid things and not understand the full scope of the work they can be expected to perform when they prepare their proposal.”

“We have this wonderful vision, lots of great programs that we have teed up,” Andrew Hunter told reporters at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Air Warfare Symposium here. “[We] still need that FY24 budget to make it real.”

The Pentagon is now operating under its third continuing resolution of fiscal 2024 as Congress continues to draft defense spending legislation. The latest stopgap deal, passed in January, funds the government through March 8.

Like a traditional CR, the measure pauses funding at the prior year’s levels — fiscal 2023, in this case — and prevents the Pentagon from starting new programs and increasing procurement quantities for existing efforts. While the department is accustomed to operating under a continuing resolution for at least a portion of each fiscal year, the 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act adds a twist.

The law stipulates that all federal agencies would face a 1% cut from fiscal 2023 funding levels if the government was still operating under a CR on Jan. 1, 2024 — which it was. However, the language includes a four-month grace period, so while that initial deadline has passed, Congress has until April 30 to approve FY24 appropriations and avoid slashing the executive branch’s spending.

While lawmakers tend to reach an annual appropriations agreement by March or April each year, Air Force officials signaled a growing concern that Congress could miss the late April deadline.

During this week’s conference, the Department of the Air Force distributed a fact sheet outlining the impact a 1% cut would have on its two services, the Air Force and Space Force. The measure would reduce the service’s buying power by nearly $13 billion and put $2.8 billion in space modernization projects on hold. It would also limit production increases for key programs like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, Small Diameter Bomb and Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, and delay seven Space Force launches, according to the department.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said in keynote speech Monday that the congressional funding standoff has caused significant delays to his vision for modernizing the service. When he took on the role in 2021, he revealed seven “operational imperatives” meant to inform Air Force and Space Force budget priorities.

Initiatives driven by those priorities, 19 of which were included in service’s FY24 budget request, have yet to be fully funded.

“It would be very disappointing to me to have been in office for an entire administration and have never received any of the needed resources to be competitive — resources that we identified in the first six months I was in office,” he said.

Key among those efforts, Kendall said, is the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, which will field fleets of drones powered by autonomous software and designed to fly alongside crewed fighters.

The service hopes to narrow its pool of potential CCA providers from five companies to two or three in fiscal 2024, but that timeline depends on when funding is available.

“We’re moving ahead with a sense of urgency on CCAs,” Kendall told reporters Tuesday. “As a preamble, everything depends upon FY24 being appropriated.”

For the Space Force, which requested $30 billion in FY24, the automatic cuts have an outsized impact. The $2.8 billion in stalled modernization projects represents nearly 10% of the service’s total budget.

The Space Force’s budget has nearly doubled since it was created in 2019, and Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman told reporters Feb. 13 that funding delays are having “an acute effect” on the service as it continues to grow.

“Our ability to do all the missions that are required is being severely impacted by not being able to get the resources that we’ve asked for,” he said.

The firm confirmed to Defense News on Thursday that the losses were on the KC-46A Pegasus refueling tanker, the T-7A Red Hawk jet trainer and the MQ-25 Stingray refueling drone. Boeing declined to say how much each program lost, noting the amounts were small enough that the company did not have to publicly report them.

In a year-end report, Boeing said its defense unit racked up nearly $1.6 billion in charges on its five major fixed-price programs throughout 2023.

The company’s work on the next pair of Air Force One presidential aircraft, which falls under the VC-25B program, incurred the highest of those charges at $482 million.

The KC-46A saw the next-highest charges at $309 million.

And the Commercial Crew, T-7A and MQ-25 Stingray incurred charges of $288 million, $275 million and $231 million, respectively, throughout 2023. Under the Commercial Crew effort, Boeing makes space capsules for NASA.

While those losses were steep, Boeing had somewhat stemmed the bleeding from 2022, when those five programs incurred charges totaling more than $4.4 billion.

Boeing’s defense sector in recent years has struggled with cost overruns, quality problems and delays on key programs that led to steep losses for the company. Overall, Boeing’s defense business lost $1.8 billion in all of 2023, though that was less than the $3.5 billion in losses from 2022.

Brian West, Boeing’s chief financial officer, said the company expects its defense sector to improve as its fixed-price programs mature and operate under tighter discipline.

The Northrop Grumman-made LGM-35A Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile has overrun its initial cost projections and incurred a critical Nunn-McCurdy breach, an Air Force spokesperson confirmed to Defense News. The Air Force notified Congress about the breach Thursday.

The Office of the Secretary of Defense will now review the Sentinel program, the Air Force said, and will decide whether to restructure the program, or cancel it entirely.

“Work under the current contract will continue until OSD completes its review of the Sentinel program,” the Air Force spokesperson said. “Maintaining a strong nuclear deterrent is critical to safeguarding our nation and protecting our allies from a nuclear attack.”

The Sentinel program is planned to replace the Air Force’s Cold War-era LGM-30G Minuteman III ICBM as part of the U.S. nuclear triad. Northrop Grumman in 2020 received a $13.3 billion contract to build Sentinel, and the program was originally expected to cost about $96 billion.

The per-unit total cost for the Sentinel was $118 million when the program’s cost, schedule and performance goals were set in 2020, the Air Force said. Since then, that has grown at least 37% to about $162 million, triggering this cost overrun process.

A critical Nunn-McCurdy breach is declared when a major defense acquisition program’s cost grows 25% over the current cost targets or at least 50% over the original cost. The Defense Department must notify Congress when such a major cost overrun occurs and certify the program is essential to national security and must continue.

The Pentagon will also have to certify to Congress that there are no cheaper alternatives to the Sentinel program, that the new cost estimates are reasonable, that it is a higher priority than other programs whose funding could be cut to cover the cost growth, and that the program’s management structure can control further cost growth. If that certification does not happen, the program would be terminated.

William LaPlante, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, said in a statement that “Sentinel is one of the department’s largest, most complex programs” and the Pentagon has taken several steps to help it.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in December 2022 declared the Sentinel program one of the Pentagon’s most important and gave it priority in the supply chain, LaPlante said. He also said that in 2023 he approved changes to its acquisition strategy meant to keep it on schedule.

“We are prepared to fulfill the department’s statutory responsibilities [in light of the Nunn-McCurdy declaration] and conduct a robust review of the program to determine what factors caused the cost growth,” LaPlante said. “As we do so, we will keep our partners in Congress informed and maintain open communications to the greatest extent possible.”

Northrop Grumman, the prime contractor on Sentinel’s engineering and manufacturing development phase, said in a statement to Defense News it is making “significant progress” on the program and reaching milestones to mature its design and reduce risk.

“As part of our work on the EMD contract, our team is committed to supporting the Air Force as it assesses and updates acquisition cost forecasts for the future phases of the program, to include construction projects, production, and deployment of the weapon system,” Northrop Grumman said. “We are focused on continuing to perform and meet our commitments under the EMD contract as we move toward delivery of this essential national security capability.”

The date Sentinel might reach initial operational capability also is now likely to slip by two years, the Air Force said. Sentinel was originally expected to reach IOC in 2029. The Government Accountability Office warned last year that deadline would likely slip until about spring 2030, and the program now appears to be falling further behind schedule.

The Air Force said the IOC delay will also be reviewed as part of the Nunn-McCurdy process.

The service noted the bulk of Sentinel’s cost growth is coming in its command and launch segment, the most complex part of the program.

This includes building more than 400 new launch facilities and laying thousands of miles of fiber optic networks, the Air Force added, as well as acquiring permanent and temporary real estate easements from hundreds of landowners.

The Sentinel program will also need to build more than 7,500 miles of utility corridors across missile wings spanning five states, the Air Force said, while keeping 400 ICBMs on alert.

The Air Force said it has not seen similarly severe cost growth in the missile itself.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall in November 2023 said the Sentinel program was “struggling” and its costs might rise.

Kendall called the scale and complexity of the Sentinel program “probably the biggest thing … that the Air Force has ever taken on,” highlighting the construction of launch complexes, real estate development and civil engineering work as particular challenges.