KIMBALL -- The United States Air Force visited Kimball Tuesday night to address concerns and questions from residents about the Sentinel Project. 

The U.S Air Force is creating a program to replace the LGM-30 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) with the LGM-35A Sentinel ICBM. 

The minuteman was installed in the 1960’s, and Gen. Colin Connor said it’s time to modernize it instead of continuing to fix and upgrade certain parts.  

“We’ve got to stay up front. It is still very viable, but there is potential in the foreseeable future that it is not,” Connor said. “That’s why we modernize, that’s why we make this big change. The time is now. If we keep kicking the can down the road, it will cost us even more.” 

Connor said the cost of the project is still unknown, and there is no definitive timeline of when it will be completed; however, certain aspects of the project have begun.  

One part of the project started is the construction at the F.E. Warren Air Force Base. The Air Force has also contracted a company to conduct land surveys as part of phase one, which is to connect two launch facilities and three launch cables. 

Taylor Walton, program manager at the Utah Air Force base, said they first need to find the land where the communication cables are located, then the Air Force creates an agreement with the property owner to do the surveys. When the time comes for construction to happen, the owners will be given advanced notice for temporary access. 

The next big milestone of the project is to deliver the results of the surveys to the acquisition committee to work and design the system, Connor said. 

Col. James Rodriguez added that the surveys are crucial in the design process. 

“As we get all the data from the surveys, we will work with our industry partners and refine the design for the specific communication cables so that we can then proceed down the next steps from design to construction,” Rodriguez said. 

Connor said it could very likely be another decade before construction takes place of removing the missiles and installing the new ones. In the next 12-18 months, Connor expects they will have some fidelity to a schedule. 

A common concern from community members is the unknown timeline of the project and lack of information received from the Air Force. 

Council Member Creg Pike said: “Us in the city need to know what the impact will be on housing and services, there will need to be places for people to stay, people will be coming to do construction; we need to have a better visibility of the schedule. The 2030’s seems a long way out. What is being done trying to improve that?” 

Connor said that certain aspects of the program that can be expedited, will be. The 2030’s seems a long way away, but with a project of this magnitude, it isn’t. 

“We want to be deliberate of walking through this program and having a definitive timeline,” Connor said. “We can’t give a certain timeline because that is what is in the works right now as the program gets put together … We will come back when we have better data and talk to you again.” 

The Air Force is working on creating a task force to relay information to community members as information becomes available. Connor said he suspects that it will be in effect in no later than a year.

“There are a lot of unknowns here and I understand the frustration,” Connor said. “Here’s the truth: The U.S. Air Force has never done anything like this in their existence. In 1960’s, we put them in, and now we have to go back to look at how we refurbish, reuse, etc. This is a monumental task that we’ve never seen before.”