Look F. E. Warren up in the federal airport directory and it does not appear as an airfield. It appears as Francis E Warren AFB Heliport, identifier FEW, elevation about 6,160 feet, with two concrete pads: H1 at 65 by 65 feet and H2 at 50 by 50 feet. There is no runway, no taxiway, no ramp. Nothing with wings and a cargo door can land on the installation at all.

That is the logic of a missile base rather than neglect. Warren has belonged to the missile force since 1958, and a missile force needs highways, not taxiways. Motors and stages travel by road from Hill Air Force Base in Utah on a transporter erector. Re-entry systems and guidance sets ride in the Payload Transporter III, a sealed climate-controlled trailer that can load, carry, emplace and remove Minuteman equipment at the silo without ever exposing it.

Fixed-wing support is borrowed. Cheyenne Regional Airport sits roughly three miles east of the gate, shared with the Wyoming Air National Guard’s 153rd Airlift Wing and its C-130s. Visitors and palletised cargo arrive there and finish the trip by car. It is easy to miss until something goes wrong on that runway: when a UH-1N of the 37th Helicopter Squadron crashed in August 2023, it crashed at the civil airport, because that is where the squadron trains.

There was once a strip of sorts. The base’s own history records the Far West Flying Circus arriving in May 1918 to sell Liberty War Bonds, and the base museum credits a Western Flying Circus led by Major Carl Spaatz in 1919. Published accounts add a single dirt landing field and a crash landing by Eddie Rickenbacker, the thinnest-sourced part of the story. No paved runway was ever built. Two turf strips south of the helipads survive as a training area.

The Department of the Platte issued General Order No. 33, and on 31 July 1867 a post went up at Crow Creek Crossing, three miles west of the brand new town of Cheyenne. It was named for Brigadier General David Allen Russell of the 8th U.S. Infantry, mortally wounded at the Battle of Opequon on 19 September 1864. Its job was to protect the men laying the Union Pacific westward. By 1870 seventy-seven wooden buildings stood around a diamond-shaped parade ground.

In the mid-1880s the War Department declared the post permanent and the wood started coming down. The Army put up 27 red brick buildings for about 100,000 dollars and kept going: by 1906 Fort D. A. Russell was a brigade-size post and the largest cavalry station in the country. Troop E of the Tenth Cavalry arrived in 1902, the first Black regiment assigned there. A young Captain John J. Pershing married Senator Warren’s daughter Helen and drew quarters on the post.

Francis Emroy Warren had been Wyoming’s first state governor and then its senator for decades, and spent much of that career steering money and units to the fort outside his home town. He died in 1929 and the post was renamed for him on 1 January 1930, although a marker on the ground gives 1929. The Second World War then turned a cavalry post into a factory for soldiers: the Quartermaster Replacement Training Center processed 122,000 men, and from November 1943 a camp held German and Italian prisoners of war.

The Air Force took control in 1947 and stood up the 463d Air Force Base Unit, reorganised the following year as the 3450th Technical Training Wing. The place became Francis E. Warren Air Force Base on 7 October 1949 and passed to Strategic Air Command on 1 February 1958. Because the line has never broken since 1867, the Air Force calls it the oldest continuously active installation in the service. The brick post survives around the missile headquarters: more than 220 contributing buildings, a National Historic Landmark since 1975.

The 90th Missile Wing was activated at F. E. Warren on 1 July 1963 as the 90th Strategic Missile Wing. It calls itself the Mighty Ninety, its motto is Impavide, undauntedly, and its job is to keep Minuteman III on full alert 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. That means 150 launch facilities and 15 missile alert facilities over 9,600 square miles of Wyoming, Nebraska and Colorado — the only American missile field that crosses two state lines.

The arithmetic underneath is rigid. Three missile squadrons, the 319th, 320th and 321st, each hold five flights; each flight is one missile alert facility with its buried launch control centre and ten launch facilities around it. Five groups run the wing, and the security forces group of about 1,250 people is by some distance the largest. Headcounts disagree: the wing fact sheet gives roughly 2,800 military and 550 civilians, the base fact-sheet index 3,361 and 964.

The number 90 is older than any of it. The lineage runs back to the 90th Bombardment Group (Heavy), constituted on 28 January 1942, which flew B-24 Liberators in the Pacific. The unit returned as a bomb wing, then a strategic reconnaissance wing on RB-47s, then the missile wing. It was redesignated 90th Missile Wing on 1 September 1991, 90th Space Wing on 1 October 1992, and 90th Missile Wing again on 1 July 2008.

Strategic Air Command took the base on 1 February 1958 and stood up the 4320th Strategic Wing to build the first twenty-four Atlas sites. It became the 706th Strategic Missile Wing, and the first Atlas D arrived in October 1959. On 2 September 1960 the 564th Strategic Missile Squadron was declared the first fully operational intercontinental ballistic missile squadron in the United States. Warren was not merely an early missile base; by the Air Force’s own account it was the first one.

Twenty-four Atlas D and E missiles eventually stood in three complexes around Cheyenne, split between the 564th, 565th and 566th Squadrons, and the 706th became the 389th Strategic Missile Wing on 1 July 1961. Solid fuel then replaced liquid. The 90th Strategic Missile Wing was activated on 1 July 1963 to run 200 LGM-30B Minuteman I missiles, and on 15 June 1965 it became the first fully operational Minuteman I wing in the Air Force.

The last Atlas came off alert that same year and the 389th was deactivated. Conversion to the LGM-30G Minuteman III began in June 1973 and finished in October 1974, with Warren’s last Minuteman I leaving alert that September. The modern shape came later: after the Peacekeeper went, the wing settled at 150 Minuteman III, each now carrying a single re-entry vehicle rather than the three it was built for. The holes in the ground are the ones dug in the 1960s.

The MX was ordered under President Carter and renamed Peacekeeper by President Reagan in November 1982, when he announced a hundred of them. Only fifty were ever deployed and they went to one base. The first ten came on alert in December 1986 with the 400th Strategic Missile Squadron at F. E. Warren, in silos backfitted from Minuteman III, and the full fifty were in place by December 1988. Each carried up to ten W87 warheads of roughly 300 kilotons.

Basing was always the unsolved part. If fifty fixed silos could be targeted, the missiles had to move, and the answer was Rail Garrison: fifty missiles on twenty-five trains, two launch cars apiece, each car 87 feet long and 550,000 pounds loaded, crews of 42 able to live aboard for a month. Ten Strategic Air Command bases were named as garrisons, with F. E. Warren the main one, and the Air Force asked 2.16 billion dollars in fiscal 1991 for the first seven trains.

A prototype car was delivered in October 1990 and deployment was meant to begin in 1992. The Cold War ended first, and in 1991 the programme was cancelled; the one surviving launch car sits in the National Museum of the United States Air Force. START II, signed in January 1993, committed the United States to eliminating Peacekeeper, and although the treaty never entered into force the Air Force did it anyway. On 19 September 2005 a crew at Papa One confirmed none was left on alert.

In 2020 the 90th Missile Wing was picked to convert to the LGM-35A Sentinel, and F. E. Warren has been out in front ever since. The first Minuteman III silo was handed over for transition work in autumn 2025 to learn what could be salvaged; reporting from Wyoming identifies Launch Facility Echo-10 as the decommissioning prototype. The first Sentinel wing command centre is under construction on the base, hardened against electromagnetic pulse and due in late 2027.

The programme it is leading is in trouble. Sentinel breached the Nunn-McCurdy cost threshold in January 2024, and in July the Pentagon’s acquisition chief, William LaPlante, certified that it had to continue because no alternative existed: 140.9 billion dollars, about 81 per cent above baseline, roughly 45.3 billion dollars of new money and at least three more years of delay. At Milestone B in 2020, he said, the ground segment had not been at preliminary design review maturity.

Around Cheyenne that means launch control centres dropping from 15 to 8, some 2,000 miles of fibre-optic cable, and new silos dug rather than old ones reused, which means buying land from ranchers who never had a missile. The Government Accountability Office found in September 2025 that the Air Force had no transition risk management plan for what it called the service’s most complex project. A 140.9 million dollar helicopter complex opened in August 2026 for the MH-139A Grey Wolf.