Brice Wallace
Many Utah companies are scrambling to find qualified workers to meet their needs for the next week, the next month or the next year.
Imagine handling that challenge and extending it by a half-century.
That’s what Northrop Grumman Corp. is facing as it develops its “Sentinel” program, a weapons program to replace the Minuteman III nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles that first became operational in 1970. The LGM-35A Sentinel is the new name for what had been called the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, or GBSD.
Construction on the company’s Sentinel headquarters in Roy is nearly complete, and the company expects the Sentinel program to employ thousands of people there and elsewhere until at least 2075.
“If we step back and we think about it, many of the engineers and technicians that will maintain and upgrade the Sentinel weapons system for many years in the future haven’t been born yet,” Frank DeMauro, vice president and general manager of the strategic deterrent systems division for Northrop Grumman’s space systems sector, said at the recent “Utah’s Defense Sector: The Next Decade” defense and aerospace industry event in Layton.
“Many of those people will come through the education system in Utah and eventually be strong players in the advancement of our weapons system in the future. The opportunity is great, and the future is bright.”
Northrop Grumman’s predecessor company, Hercules, was founded in Magna in 1912. Northrop has developed, sustained and modernized strategic missiles for more than 60 years. Sentinel’s 900,000-square-foot office and manufacturing headquarters will host more than 4,000 employees, and the weapons system “will provide strategic deterrents for our nation and our allies for the next 50 years,” DeMauro said.
But the company will need rocket scientists, nuclear experts, systems engineers, supply chain professionals and a skilled trained workforce to be involved in missile design, engineering, rocket assembly, manufacturing, software development, business administration, supply chain management and program management.
They will join more than 8,100 existing Northrop Grumman employees at 14 locations in Utah.
“With the Sentinel program still in the early stages of engineering and manufacturing development, we have an opportunity to bring thousands of new highly skilled, high-paying jobs to the Roy and Promontory campuses over the next decade,” DeMauro said.
He called upon Utahns to collaborate to build a skilled, diverse pipeline of workers, without which “we can’t support our current growth trajectory,” he said.
“We all need to work together to encourage the next generation to pursue careers in STEM and skilled manufacturing,” he said. “Today’s student workforce will provide strategic deterrent that keeps our nation safe the next 50 years and beyond, while others can help put footprints on Mars.”
DeMauro said a renaissance is happening in the aerospace industry, which is on the cusp of major world-changing breakthroughs, with Utah “right in the middle.”
“We hope these unprecedented opportunities inspire a new generation of Utah professionals to pursue careers in mechanical, electrical and software engineering,” he said.
Utah is home to both established companies and startups pushing innovation “in space and sky,” he said.
“After finally building momentum for decades, Utah’s aerospace industry is primed for a prolonged heyday, fueled by an innovation imperative across civil defense and space sectors,” he said. “Over the next decade and beyond, Utah’s aerospace industry will make major contributions and breakthroughs that future generations will read about in history books, and along the way the nearly 1,000 aerospace companies in Utah will bring economic benefits to the Beehive State.”
Already, the Sentinel program has awarded over $200 million in subcontracts to 125 small businesses, he said.
In early 2020, the Governor’s Office of Economic Development board approved a $59.9 million tax credit incentive over 20 years for the company, tied to the creation of 2,250 high-paying jobs over the next two decades. According to GOED documents, 92 percent of the new jobs are associated with the Northrop Grumman team supporting the new weapons system.
Cost estimates for the new weapons program are close to $100 billion for acquisition and $264 billion over its lifetime, according to National Defense magazine.
Utah’s history with the Sentinel predecessor includes completing the first operational Minuteman III in Ogden in 1970.
Speakers at a panel discussion at the event said the Minuteman III program may be ramping down but will continue to need vendors and suppliers to support it for at least 15 more years.
“I think we have a long time that we’re still going to have to support that weapons system. … We do have to maintain that weapons system for our nation’s security,” said Michelle Hathaway, vice director of the Ogden Air Logistics Complex at Hill Air Force Base.
“Minuteman III is going to be around at least until the end of the 2030s, as Minuteman III will start running of our their major components and we have to meet their operations requirements about the same time frame that Sentinel begins to deploy to the field,” said Rick Allen, a vice president of strategic systems for BAE Systems who directs systems engineering and joint mission support for the Minuteman III system and Sentinel.
Kicking off the event, Gov. Spencer Cox said Sentinel “will serve as the modernized backbone of the U.S. military’s land-based nuclear defense.”
“With the Department of Defense and Northrop Grumman’s Sentinel program headquartered at Hill Air Force Base, Utah is hosting some of the most important military modernization and digitalization happening anywhere in the world,” Cox said.
Cox highlighted the findings of a Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute study that indicates that the Utah’s aerospace and defense industry has an economic impact of more than $19 billion annually, supports more than 200,000 Utah jobs and represents about 10 percent of the state’s GDP.
Utah is part of the global transformation of the industry “from not just turning wrenches but also turning out millions of lines of complex [software] code,” he said.
“We realize the Department of Defense and businesses have choices as to where they assign missions and locate workload. Lots of states and cities and communities continue to vie for their locations to be chosen,” the governor said.
“We are so grateful and a little bit proud, if I might say, that so many have chosen Utah. And we are committed to continuing to ensure that Utah is viewed as a great place for missions to be performed, work to be accomplished, and we are valued partners in accomplishing the important work for national defense and national security.”
The event at the Davis Conference Center was held on the eve of the two-day “Warriors Over the Wasatch Air & Space Show” at Hill Air Force Base.