The U.S. Air Force general who oversees America’s intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) force sees a long future ahead for the new LGM-35A Sentinel after it eventually enters service. At the same time, he has acknowledged challenges surrounding the Sentinel program, which is still being restructured nearly two years after huge cost overruns triggered a full review. Northrop Grumman, the prime contractor for the missile, says it is now working with the Air Force to try to re-accelerate the program, which is now years, if not decades, behind schedule. Air Force Gen. Stephen Davis, head of Air Force Global Strike Command (AFGSC), recently discussed Sentinel, as well as the existing Minuteman III ICBMs the new missile is set to replace, among other topics, with TWZ‘s Howard Altman. This was Davis’ first interview since taking command of AFGSC in November. Today, there are 400 Minuteman IIIs loaded in silos spread across five states. The Air Force’s goal is to replace them, one-for-one, with new Sentinels. In 2020, the Air Force declared Northrop Grumman as the winner of the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) competition that led to Sentinel.

Northrop, btw, didn't really win any sort of competition, they were literally the only choice (I guess "the other competitor dropped out before we got to the actual competition" sort of counts as winning)

“Sentinel is probably the biggest program going on in the Department of War right now, certainly in the Department of the Air Force,” Davis said. “Sentinel brings some important new capabilities that we actually have to deliver for the warfighter, for USSTRATCOM [U.S. Strategic Command].” Much about the new LGM-35A is classified. The Air Force and Northrop Grumman have talked broadly in the past about it offering greater range and improved accuracy, as well as reliability and sustainability benefits, over the aging Minuteman IIIs. The stated plan is for each Sentinel to carry a single W87-1 nuclear warhead inside a Mk 21A re-entry vehicle, but that loading may change in the future, as you can read more about here. Gen. Davis also called attention to the benefits that are expected to come from Sentinel’s use of open-architecture systems and a supporting infrastructure that is more digital in nature. In general, open architectures, especially software-defined ones, are intended to make it easier to integrate new and improved capabilities and functionality down the line. “I think Sentinel is going to be a bit easier with some of the things we’re designing into the program, the digital infrastructure, the open architecture,” Davis said. “I think it will make it easier to upgrade and keep that missile relevant. I don’t have any worries about being able to do that in the future.” The Minuteman III, also known by the designation LGM-30G, first entered operational service in 1970. The missiles, as well as their supporting infrastructure, have received incremental upgrades since then. The design is an evolution of the earlier Minuteman I and II types that entered service in the 1960s. The Air Force did field a newer ICBM, the LGM-118 Peacekeeper, in the 1980s, but withdrew the last of those missiles from service in 2005 as a result of U.S.-Russian arms control agreements.

“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 and 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. During a quarterly earnings call today, Northrop Grumman CEO Kathy Warden discussed Sentinel and said that the restructuring effort is still underway, creating continued timeline uncertainty. “We are in the middle of supporting the U.S. Air Force as they restructure the Sentinel Program,” Warden said. “Coming out of that, they will firm [up] a schedule that both locks in new time ranges for milestone B [entry into the engineering and manufacturing development phase], initial operating capability, final operating capability.” “I don’t want to get ahead of the Air Force in talking about that, but certainly, as I have shared, and the Air Force has, as well, we are working to accelerate the timelines that were published coming out of the Nunn-McCurdy breach two years ago,” she continued. “So that is the goal, and we’re making good progress to identifying options to do so. We still believe that the program will be in development for several years and not transitioning into production until later in the decade, and that production will very much be guided by the milestone achievement during development.”

Overall, the Air Force and Pentagon leadership continue to view the Sentinel program as a top national security imperative. The announcement of the GBSD effort to replace Minuteman III and the selection of Northrop Grumman’s design had prompted new discussions about the utility of the ground-based leg of America’s nuclear triad. As it stands now, the primary purpose of America’s silo-based ICBMs is to act as a ‘warhead sponge’ that would force any opponent to expend substantial resources on trying to neutralize it in a future nuclear exchange. It also stands as the fastest nuclear response option in the Pentagon’s strategic portfolio. A the same time, the deterioration in the security situation around the globe, with China drastically expanding its nuclear arsenal and Russia at war with its neighbor in Europe, among other proliferation and strategic weapons development concerns, have bolstered the case for Sentinel and nuclear modernization as a whole. As AFGSC’s Gen. Davis has now told us, the hope is also that the benefits the Sentinels will bring when they finally do enter service will ensure they remain on guard for decades to come.

ARTEC consortium, which is a joint venture of KNDS Germany and Rheinmetall, announced plans to increase annual production of heavy wheeled GTK Boxer armored vehicles. And they plan to reach such a milestone in 2030. Janes noticed this at the Defence iQ International Armoured Vehicles (IAV) 2026 conference in Farnborough, Great Britain. At the same time, improvement of the basic chassis, or drive module, which is common to all Boxer-based vehicles, is being carried out. Currently, ARTEC already has five plants in Europe alone and is constantly expanding supply chains by adding new sources. At the same time, if necessary, the company is ready to deploy additional armored vehicle assembly capacities. In total, currently over 2,100 Boxer family vehicles in 28 modifications for 7 countries have been delivered and are being manufactured. At the same time, the drive module is compatible between all operators and can be changed within 40 minutes. If we look at previous figures in more detail, it turns out to be 837 armored vehicles in 8 versions for Germany, 629 in 5 variants for Great Britain, 272 units in 5 modifications for the Netherlands, 211 in 8 versions for Australia, 118 in 5 variants for Lithuania and 22 of two types for Qatar. Of course, there is also room for Ukraine here, with over 50 vehicles in two variants.

Defense Express notes that according to previously known information, Ukrainian military should receive 54 RCH 155 SPGs and 9 AiTO30 command vehicles. That is, together it turns out to be 63 units of Boxer-based armored vehicles, whose delivery status remains unknown for now. Regarding production increase plans, this is a very logical response, considering massive defense procurement by many countries. Germany alone plans to purchase up to 5,000 Boxers or vehicles based on them, which will cost approximately €40 billion. Also, other countries will join the list of operators, such as Portugal, which plans to take 90 units. Well, and one shouldn't forget that additional mass production allows somewhat reducing the quite considerable price of Boxer.

The US, btw, has produced a little under 5k of the Stryker, a much cheaper and less sophisticated 8x8 APC (although it gets a lot pricier in its modern IFV variants, but so does the Boxer, and most Boxers seem to be the basic APC variant or other mostly unarmed configurations anyway, which ought to be on the cheaper end). But yeah, the Germans are going to get 5k of these and the manufacturer's going to be pumping out 1k yearly, for... which clients exactly, given that up until now the averaged out yearly sales have been like 130?

If the target state falters and fails to crush the insurrectionists during this critical stage, the insurgents will be able to rapidly organize a guerilla army using their newfound notoriety and political power and proceed to go about fighting the revolutionary war and eventually overthrowing the government. There won't be a state apparatus left afterwards to let the revolutionaries govern anything, but generally the kind of people who use these methods don't really care about little things like that.

There is a critical drawback to this model, however - if the state doesn't buckle and cracks down effectively during the key terrorism phase, the insurgency is doomed. Unlike the communist model, in this phase the insurgency isn't a broad-based social movement that can withstand official sanctions - it's a plot involving a few hundred heavily-armed maniacs who can simply be killed by the police.

So how does this tie into Iran? Well, earlier this month organic protests about economic issues were hijacked by heavily-armed insurgents who proclaimed their general opposition to the government, fought running gun battles with police, caused a shocking amount of property damage, and attempted to organize public support for their movement via an intense social media push - all of this with some success! Then the Iranian government cracked down hard and the insurrection collapsed. All of this ties exactly into the model of a bourgeois-nationalist "terrorist insurgency" which was defeated during its period of maximum vulnerability - the terrorism phase itself - by a robust and agile state opponent. It also explains the sudden and massive push in the West to recognize the insurgency as a rival Iranian government almost immediately - all of this was very clearly orchestrated by Western interests (read: Mossad), and this insurrection had the clear aim of either overthrowing the Iranian government outright or starting a civil war in Iran. The people pushing to change the Iranian flag emoji on this website (which remains as the pre-1979 flag to this day) absolutely knew what their intended end-state was.

The key thing to realize is that the bourgeois-nationalist insurgency method does not require a large network and mass popular support. It requires a few hundred - or even a few dozen - hard men with guns, and a capable PR team capable of getting people behind the insurgents so as to build a mass movement and support for guerilla war overnight. This is what Mossad et al. was trying to do in Iran earlier this month, and that was in all likelihood the actual extent of their remaining attack network in the country after much of it was dismantled during and after the Twelve Days' War.

Gen. Michael Guetlein, head of the Golden Dome missile defense program, said the success of this effort depends on the ability to field defenses that are both scalable and affordable, including new directed-energy and other non-kinetic technologies aimed at lowering the cost of intercepting missiles. Speaking Jan. 23 at the AFCEA Space Industry Days conference in Los Angeles, Guetlein said the program’s central challenge is the economics of missile defense, specifically how the cost of each intercept limits how many interceptor shots the United States can afford to keep on hand. He described this as an issue of “magazine depth,” a term that refers to the number of interceptors available to respond to an attack. Missile defense systems with limited magazines can be exhausted quickly if an adversary launches multiple weapons or employs decoys. The thinking is that a system that can only handle a small number of intercepts does not provide credible deterrence. The “cost per kill” has to come down, said Guetlein. Current U.S. missile defense interceptors, which were designed for regional or limited homeland defense missions, cost millions of dollars apiece and are used to defeat much lower-cost weapons. Analysts have pointed out that this imbalance invites adversaries to overwhelm defenses through volume.

“We have the most exquisite capabilities on the planet, with a high probability of kill. They do not miss but they take forever to build. They’re exceptionally expensive, and as a result, I have very small magazine depths, because the cost per kill is so high,” said Guetlein. “I have to flip that equation.” Golden Dome is the Defense Department’s effort to design a next-generation homeland missile defense architecture capable of countering advanced threats such as hypersonic glide vehicles, modern ballistic missiles and fractional orbital bombardment systems. Unlike existing missile defense programs that rely largely on ground- and sea-based interceptors, Golden Dome envisions a multi-layered system that integrates space-based sensors, communications and interceptors into a unified framework.

Pressure to scale production

Guetlein told the AFCEA conference that what the Pentagon needs immediately from industry is the ability to scale production and deliver lower-cost ways to defeat missiles, including non-kinetic options. Analysts say space-based interceptors capable of maneuvering on orbit could be effective but would also be among the most expensive elements of any future architecture. Directed energy systems, including lasers and neutral particle beams, are among the concepts Guetlein has highlighted as potential ways to drive down the cost per shot while increasing magazine depth. Neutral particle beams, which remain largely experimental, would theoretically operate at near-light speed and damage targets by disrupting electronics or generating heat. Guetlein also pointed to “left of launch” defenses, a phrase used to describe efforts to stop missile threats before a launch occurs. That can include intelligence and surveillance activities that detect preparations, as well as non-kinetic actions that complicate or delay an adversary’s ability to fire. The goal here is to reduce the number of missiles that ever need to be intercepted. “Because when you’re trying to defend something the size of the United States, I can’t do it the way we’ve done it overseas. I have to have a new way of doing it,” he said.

The urgency to scale production and lower costs has already shaped Pentagon investment decisions. The Defense Department recently announced plans to directly invest in the production of interceptor missiles built by Lockheed Martin and solid rocket motors produced by L3Harris Technologies. While not labeled as Golden Dome funding, those investments align directly with the program’s emphasis on deeper magazines and lower per-unit costs. They also speak to Guetlein’s broader argument that Golden Dome is less a technology challenge than an industrial one. “We’re accelerating private capital investment, and we’re taking private equities’ view of the defense industrial base,” Guetlein said, adding that he regularly meets with investment bankers to help stabilize demand signals as companies seek capital to expand capacity. That emphasis on economics was echoed in the National Defense Strategy released Jan. 23, which identifies defense of the homeland as the Pentagon’s top priority. “The Department will prioritize efforts to develop President Trump’s Golden Dome for America, with a specific focus on options to cost-effectively defeat large missile barrages and other advanced aerial attacks,” the document states.

Architecture to remain secret

Guetlein said details of the Golden Dome architecture will remain classified. He said conversations with industry are occurring almost exclusively through one-on-one engagements, rather than open forums. After his confirmation as Golden Dome program manager in July, Guetlein said foreign actors began cyber targeting the defense industrial base, prompting senior officials to clamp down on public discussion. “We have been quiet,” he said. “I have not been talking to industry consortiums. I’ve not been talking to the press. I’ve not been talking to the think tanks, and it wasn’t until September I was allowed to even start talking to the Hill.” That secrecy has begun to draw scrutiny. In a defense spending bill for fiscal year 2026 approved by the House last week, appropriators said they support Golden Dome but faulted the administration for failing to provide sufficient detail on how $23 billion in mandatory funding has been allocated. The bill directs the Pentagon to submit more detailed plans and justifications. Guetlein said the program is on track to meet the administration’s timeline.

“By the summer of ‘28 we will be able to defend the entire nation against ballistic missiles as well as other generation aerial threats,” he said, calling Golden Dome an “unprecedented challenge.”

uh, yeah, sure...

As program director, Guetlein reports to the deputy secretary of defense and has been granted unusually broad authorities. “I have budget authority, contract authority, hiring authority, technical authority, security authority to get after protecting the homeland.” The Golden Dome office, Guetlein said, currently has 52 staff and expects to grow to about 100, even though he is authorized to reach 300. Requirements are set centrally, but procurement is decentralized across the services and agencies. “I’ve got the Space Force buying SBIs. I’ve got the Army buying munitions and sensors. I’ve got the Navy buying munitions. I’ve got the Missile Defense Agency buying next generation interceptors, glide phase interceptors, and a whole host of other capability,” Guetlein said. He also works closely with the Space Development Agency’s low Earth orbit sensor and transport network. Guetlein noted that the Missile Defense Agency’s SHIELD procurement vehicle is not part of Golden Dome, despite recent headlines about the large number of vendors selected to compete under the contract. SHIELD, he said, is simply “a tool that I can reach in and use if I need to.”

Command-and-control layer

One of the most demanding pieces of the program, he said, is the command-and-control layer that connects sensors, decision-makers and interceptors across services and classification levels. That software “glue layer” must be demonstrated this summer, integrated with interceptors in 2027, and shown operating against credible threats in 2028. To speed that effort, the Golden Dome office formed a command-and-control consortium of six companies working side by side, an arrangement Guetlein described as a departure from traditional contracting approaches. Beyond technology, Guetlein said entrenched culture and organizational behavior pose daily obstacles. He criticized what he described as a compliance-driven mindset that prioritizes risk elimination over speed and integration. “We cannot keep doing business as usual,” he said. “That’s really what our challenge is going to be.” While President Trump has floated the idea of international involvement in Golden Dome, Guetlein said he has not yet been authorized to engage allies. “Everything we are doing is allied by design,” he said, adding that planning already assumes future integration of partner capabilities and access to overseas territory for sensors. Golden Dome has figured into a broader geopolitical dispute over Greenland, where Trump has said expanded U.S. access would be “vital” to the program, including for radar and interceptor deployment.

Calls for Europe to decouple from the U.S. and rely solely on domestically produced weaponry have grown louder. However, experts estimate that achieving such independence would take at least 10 years and require around one trillion dollars. This assessment was reported by Defense Romania, citing The Wall Street Journal. Significant progress has already been made in increasing production volumes. For example, in the field of 155-mm artillery shells, European manufacturers have surpassed the U.S., with Rheinmetall alone producing 1.5 million rounds per year. When it comes to air defense missiles, industry giant MBDA has quadrupled production, but this still amounts to only 40 units per month, which Ukraine could expend in two nights. Europe is capable of supplying itself with armored vehicles, ships, artillery, and submarines. Yet in several areas, Europe still lags behind, including stealth aircraft, long-range missiles, and satellite reconnaissance. Work is underway to create alternatives, but these solutions will not be ready for years.

Europe's collective defense budgets now reach $560 billion, double the funding levels of ten years ago, but this is still less than the U.S. Department of Defense, whose budget is expected to reach $850 billion. By 2035, European countries aim to reach about 80% of U.S. spending levels. A major issue, however, is not budgets, but fragmentation. France maintains a high degree of defense autonomy, while Germany and many Eastern European nations continue to purchase American or at least South Korean equipment, perpetuating dependence. Overall, the article emphasizes that building a European pillar within NATO, or even a fully integrated European army, is no longer a dream of Euro-bureaucrats, but a necessity. Yet achieving true military independence from the U.S. will take at least a decade. Defense Express notes that this timeline is realistic, given the lack of domestic equivalents for many types of weapons. For instance, precision MLRS systems like HIMARS remain largely unavailable in Europe. Despite progress in France and initial projects in Spain, serial production is still years away. Regarding defense budgets, the article refers to aggregate figures, which can be misleading. Countries such as Poland and the Baltic States have significantly increased their spending, Germany is ramping up production, and France is attempting reforms domestically—often encountering political resistance. Italy, by contrast, has calculated its defense budget in a complex manner, including infrastructure costs, while Spain has refused to commit to major defense spending increases.

Fragmentation also stems from national priorities: many European countries favor domestic defense industries, even if the offered systems are inferior, more expensive, produced in limited numbers, or exist only on paper. Joint procurement is increasingly becoming the norm, as seen with the CAVS armored vehicle program. However, projects like the sixth-generation FCAS fighter demonstrate the challenges: disagreements over role distribution among countries led to the project’s collapse. Europe thus faces a long road of work and compromise before it can achieve true independence from the U.S.