U.S. Air Force to hit major milestones on Sentinel Project this year

The community gathered at the Sage Brush Monday night for the Town Hall Meeting on the U.S. Air Force Sentinel Project.

KIMBALL -- The United States Air Force Sentinel Task Force held a Town Hall Meeting in Kimball Monday night to inform the public of key milestones coming in 2026. 

Col. James Rodriguez, Director of Sentinel Launch Systems, said, “2026 is going to be a really awesome year because we’re going to make a lot of progress, and some of it is still the same activity.” 

The Air Force will begin a Utility Corridor Pilot Project, which is the first step in updating the copper lines to fiber.

This summer, just north of Kimball, they will be laying conduit in the ground along a 20-mile stretch of land. 

“We are doing that really to learn; we want to explore various construction techniques to minimize the impact on landowners,” Rodriguez said. “It will be permanent conduit; we won’t blow the fiber in this summer because it does have a lifespan – about 25 years – and then we will come back at some point in the future, blow fiber in and connect it, and it will be operational and ready to use.” 

This town hall meeting acted as a 90-day notice to landowners who will be directly impacted by the construction activity. Those residents should have also received letters in the mail, and the Air Force will continue to communicate with them throughout the process. 

“We will then send a 30-day letter following up with construction activity starting, then a 7-day onsite where we will come out to your property and explain what’s going to happen,” Rodriguez said. 

One community member was concerned about their lines running directly under a set of trees on their property. 

Rodriguez said: “One of the things we will be evaluating during the pilot program and one of the things we’ve asked our designer to do is avoid situations like that. Using a lot of modern construction techniques, we can avoid that completely. The line may still go underneath the trees, but we will use horizontal directional drilling, for example, to go underneath the trees and not even disturb them.” 

They have also broke ground on a site in Northern Utah where they are building a prototype silo, according to Katie Parks, Deputy Program Executive Officer for ICBMs.

This will give them insight into how to build new silos in the most effective and cost-efficient way. 

“We don’t want to spend any more time or any more taxpayer money than we have to,” Parks said. “The more efficient we can make that, the better we can do it, the less were going to impact your land.” 

Rodriguez added that they will be working with landowners to acquire up to a total of 5 acres for a launch silo site and 10 acres for a launch center site, which is where the missile operators are. 

The Air Force also plans to do the first test launch for Sentinel in 2027, which will be done out of the Air Force space in California. 

“Last year we managed to put all of the different sections of the missile together in one big stack the way they’re supposed to be so we can eventually do a ground test with all of them at the same time,” Parks said. “Next year the goal is to take a new missile stack and do a test launch of portions of the sentinel missile.” 

Contractors are also continuing environmental studies, which Rodriguez said is an ongoing process as the project moves along. 

“We are continuing to prepare the grounds by doing geotechnical borings throughout the missile field; the pace of that will significantly increase this summer as we start preparing for launch silo construction,” Rodriguez said. “We will be going out to a lot of our launch silos trying to understand what the soil conditions are so we can make sure when we do construction, we can incorporate the right construction techniques to make sure these silos can be sustained for decades.”

Construction continues at the F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne where two major buildings - The Wing Command Center and Missile Handling Complex – are expected to be completed within the next 1-2 years. 

“These are multi-million-dollar facilities that we have to replace before we bring Sentinel online, so we have the facilities to this work,” said Stephen Kravitsky, Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Task Force Detachment 10 Director.