Newsgroups: sci.military.moderated
From: "Paul F Austin" <paustin@digital.net>
Subject: Re: cost of cruise missile
Date: Tue, 6 Jul 1999 15:21:18 GMT

arzewski@my-deja.com wrote in message ...


>www.abcnews.com reports that "Navy ships fired about 450 Tomahawk cruise
>missiles, at a price of about $1 million a missile. Air Force B-52
>bombers launched 90 air-launched cruise missiles, which cost about $2
>million apiece."
>
>why does it cost double if launched from an aircraft?


The ALCM was procured by SAC for nuclear strike (strike 1) and was procured
in much smaller numbers than the various Tomahawk versions (strike 2).
Finally, ALCM airframes are out of production (strike 3). The CALCM is a
remanufactured nuke so depending on the accounting can be _very_ expensive
(if you count the cost of replacing the missile from new production) or
_very_ cheap (if you take the airframe as being fully depreciated).

CALCMs can only be replaced by conversion of nuclear ALCMs in storage since
they were replaced by Advanced Cruise Missiles, a more stealthy bird. The
Tomahawk production line is still warm so more airframes can be produced
without incurring line startup costs. I suspect that new CALCM airframes
would require building new tooling and re-creating the whole subcontractor
base before production could start.

In fact production of new CALCMs _won't_ start because JSOW will replace it
in the inventory. JSOW is a little short in range compared with CALCM but
there're efforts in train to increase the range.

Conscience, that quiet voice that says "Someone may be watching"

Paul F Austin
paustin@digital.net