The U.S. Air Force still is pushing ahead with plans to modernize its intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) force as the Pentagon continues to work through its latest nuclear posture review, which will likely decide the future of that entire leg of America’s “Nuclear Triad.” In the meantime, the service is still conducting smaller more immediate projects to update the dated infrastructure supporting this deterrent arm, including replacing huge tape-based data systems that personnel used to reprogram missile launch codes and other data.
On Oct. 2, 2017, the Air Force reported that the 91st Missile Wing at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, one of three ICBM wings in the service, had begun using a new information transfer system to upload critical mission information into each individual LGM-30G Minuteman III ICBM. The first of these new Data Transfer Units (DTU) became available in June 2017 as part of a $68 million upgrade program.“The DTU loads the Missile Guidance Set, which is the brain of the Minuteman III, with sensitive cryptographic data and other information the missile needs in order to function,” U.S. Air Force Captain Kevin Drumm, the codes operations chief at the 91st Operation Support Squadron, explained to the service’s reporters. “The DTU has increased productivity and shortened the time required to conduct coding operations.”
Shortening the time is putting it mildly. Before the upgraded units arrived, the 91st was using a system called the Launch Facility Load Cartridge to program tape memory cartridges with all the necessary data. According to Drumm, it would take 45 minutes to build the data set, which personnel would then spend another 30 minutes loading into a single missile.On top of that, the cartridge programming equipment was so old that it could only fit enough information for one missile on a single tape cartridge tape unit, which weighed approximately 45 pounds each. The information for each missile is unique for security purposes, so the wing’s code team would need to run through the process 50 times and lug all of the cassettes out to the dispersed launch facilities.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/14828/usaf-replaces-bulky-tape-cartridges-for-loading-launch-codes-into-icbms
