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bebops said:

Does EMP missile exist? EMP can fry all surrounding electronics.

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siegecrossbow said:

You can generate high powered microwaves from specialized warheads. Those can fry electronics.

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sheogorath said:

Isn't the main limitation of the concept the fact the the EM pulse disperses rapidly in the atmosphere, really limiting what you can do with it unless you use a nuclear weapon, in which case you might as well go all in on a nuclear strike anyway?

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siegecrossbow said:

Doesn’t matter much if your target is within a couple hundred yard radius from the warhead.

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BasilicaLew said:

Yet at that point you might as well as use a normal warhead in most cases, as it’s better to have no target, than a bunch of "DO NOT SHOOT AT ME AGAIN!" targets incase the missile keeps flying.

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siegecrossbow said:

You can still reduce casualties this way though I doubt that the current leadership cares much about that.

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siegecrossbow said:

You can still reduce casualties this way though I doubt that the current leadership cares much about that.

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“We have the challenge of continuing to sustain Minuteman III until we can get Sentinel up online,” Davis said. “We’ve continued to modernize that to keep it relevant. It will continue to sustain it until Sentinel comes on.”

The original program timeline for the Sentinel called for it to begin entering service in 2029. The Minuteman III would continue to serve into 2036 as the Air Force transitioned fully to the new missile.

What the current timeline for Sentinel is now is unknown. In 2024, delays and cost overruns triggered a formal legal requirement for a review of the program, referred to as a Nunn-McCurdy breach, as you can read more about here. This, in turn, prompted an effort to restructure the program that was expected to take 18 to 24 months. At that time, the Pentagon’s Office of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) projected the total acquisition costs could soar to approximately $140.9 billion, an 81 percent increase over the original estimates, even with the restructuring.

Even then, it had begun to emerge that the bulk of the issues with the Sentinel program were tied to the ground-based infrastructure rather than the missile itself. It has since become clear that the Air Force did not have a full understanding of the magnitude of the physical construction that would be required. This has been compounded by the determination that reusing existing Minuteman III silos is no longer viable, and that entirely new silos will have to be built.

The understanding that it would be possible to reuse substantial parts of the existing Minuteman III infrastructure factored heavily into the original basing plan for Sentinel. The Air Force had considered and rejected a wide range of alternatives, including launchers positioned at the bottom of lakes or in tunnels.

With the Nunn-McCurdy breach, the timeline for replacing Minuteman III has fallen into limbo, at least publicly. Last September, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a Congressional watchdog, released a report saying the Air Force was considering options for extending the service life of Minuteman III out as far as 2050.

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