Air Drive Launches First ICBM Check of 2023

Air Drive World Strike Command performed its first intercontinental ballistic missile check of 2023 on Feb. 9, launching an unarmed Minuteman III from Vandenberg Area Drive Base, Calif. 

The 11:01 p.m. launch, supported by Airmen from the 91st Missile Wing at Minot Air Drive Base, N.D., included a check reentry automobile that landed some 4,200 miles away within the Kwajalein Atoll within the Marshall Islands, in keeping with an Air Drive launch. 

The check was a part of routine missile testing and and “not the results of present world occasions,” the discharge mentioned. 

“These check launches confirm the accuracy and reliability of the ICBM weapon system and supply beneficial knowledge to make sure a continued secure, safe, and efficient nuclear deterrent,” the discharge continued. 

It was the primary launch for the reason that Air Drive a pair of ICBM exams have been performed over three weeks in August and September, the one two check launches of 2022. The 91st Missile Wing supported each of these exams as properly. 

 The launch additionally adopted by lower than every week the Feb. 8 show by North Korea of as much as a dozen ICBMs throughout a army parade, including to a tense peirod during which:

The Minuteman III entered service in 1970, and can stay in use till the next-generation LGM-35 Sentinel, previously known as the Floor-Primarily based Strategic Deterrent, is mission succesful. Sentinel is scheduled to achieve preliminary operational functionality in 2029, with full operational functionality following within the 2030s. Realistically, which means the Air Drive will probably function the Minuteman for at the very least one other decade.