The Air Force is planning to shift the sustainment of its Minuteman III launch facilities and launch control centers to a depot-maintenance model by 2017, said Maj. Gen. Sandra Finan, commander of the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center at Kirtland AFB, N.M. This is one of the efficiency and cost-saving initiatives that the service is adopting across its nuclear enterprise to squeeze “every bit of value out of every dollar,” said Finan on Sept. 17 during the nuclear panel at AFA’s Air and Space Conference in National Harbor, Md. She said the new model will be like the preprogrammed depot maintenance construct that the Air Force uses for its aircraft. “An aircraft goes in for PDM maintenance. It gets overhauled. It comes back out; it is almost like a new aircraft,” she said.
The U.S. military is maintaining a beefed-up presence in the Middle East, including fighters and air defense assets, following the U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities June 22 and subsequent retaliation by the Iranians against Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.
