Comment:  Here is another viewpoint on what went wrong with Sentinel and how to fix it.

Personal Opinion:  When President Reagan restarted the B-1 program (it became B-1B).  My sojourn as an observer / guest to watch the restart in action revealed one major prime, four sub primes and over 300 subcontractors and vendors.  This is to get a Bomber, not infrastructure!  Fresh from serving in missiles, my amazement was how well the System Program Office (SPO) at WPAFB threw themselves into this task to get 100 bombers designed, tested and built.  How many made it to be in the fleet today?  A lot less.  What went wrong?  They were doing system testing with production decisions.  Each production lot run learning from the testing results created a different bomber design resulting in a sustainment nightmare.  They knew this was going to be a problem, but felt they had no other choice to get these 100 done quickly circumventing an adequate testing of prototypes.   

Apply this thinking to the proposed fix below of breaking it all up into a lot of separate and new contracting actions.  Something about moving deck chairs around on the Titanic comes to mind. 

Major Point:  The prime and major subs were well able to marshal the 300 other contractors and vendors better than the SPO could manage.  It all had to be delegated out.  My task was to see the flow of data coming back reporting to the SPO all of this progress in action.  The reports coming back were all managed by a team of people using a highly efficient system of flagging problems fast and getting these elevated.   This was One Big Contract for an airplane primarily.

My opinion on Sentinel gets to the problem we saw at AFIT through our discussions in class with thousands of students working in acquisition and sustainment:  Failure to Determine the Requirements and stopping Requirements Creep.  Bottom Line:  Give the Prime Contractor meaningful Requirements with adequate funding and allow them to go to work.

Minuteman II was replaced with Minuteman III when I served with minimal impact.

Switching to a Sentinel would have been minimal impact as well were it not for a huge infrastructure deterioration / obsolescence on copper cabling.  All of this must still be maintained during a very long process of replacement.  Again, inadequate effort in accurately determining requirements was the culprit.

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https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2026/1/6/pentagon-industry-looking-to-put-troubled-sentinel--program-back-on-track

"Pentagon, Industry Looking to Put Troubled Sentinel

Program Back On Track"

Quote:

At the root of Sentinel’s issues is a failure to appropriately compartmentalize the program, Todd Harrison, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said in an interview.

Where the Air Force went wrong is it lumped together all of the different components of Sentinel into one big program, and the service should have separated them into different acquisitions, he said.

“In reality, the things that they need modernized are very different and require very different skill sets and probably should have been awarded to different contractors,” Harrison said.

The biggest parts of the system are the missiles, the silos and the command-and-control infrastructure, he said. “Digging a silo and pouring concrete and building large steel doors and things, that’s very different than building a missile, but they awarded it all in one big contract to Northrop Grumman.”

While there is no simple fix, Harrison said the Air Force should restructure the program by recompeting the non-missile facets to different contractors, “whatever state it’s in.”

Quote:

Harrison said if the Sentinel program is to succeed amid its delays and cost overruns, the Air Force needs to learn from its mistakes.

“I think the root cause was the acquisition strategy that they tried to combine all the different parts of the program into one big contract,” he said. “And so, I would hope that that’s something that people can learn from right away. Don’t make this mistake again on the next big, complicated program.”