Vox Nihili posted:

Trabisnikof posted:

is there any "open source intelligence" estimate of the number of tomahawk cruise missiles expended in the last few years? or any other US missiles?

Gripweed posted:

I remember like 20 years ago reading an article that said that aircraft carriers were going to be replaced with submarines that could launch drones. Did they ever build one of those?

quote:

The United States has approximately 3500 Tomahawk missiles on hand - so few that at-sea reloading capability is pointless because in the event of war the USN will actually run out of missiles before it runs out of launchers.

Let's run the numbers.


First of all, the Tomahawk is an old system and has been manufactured in several blocks since its introduction in the 1980s. Block II missiles have long since been taken out of service and Block III missiles appear to have left service recently - the only models currently in use are Block IV (produced since 2004) and Block V (remanufactured Block IV missiles "produced" since 2021).

An examination of public DoD budget materials indicates that the Pentagon purchased 3882 missiles between FY 2004 and FY 2020.* Wikipedia lists 385 missiles fired in anger since 2004, the vast majority from 2011 onwards when Block IV missiles would have been preferred. As such it's likely that the current US stockpile of Tomahawks is approximately 3500 Block IV and Block V weapons.

* Raytheon claimed to have manufactured 4000 Block IV missiles as of 2017 - I believe this discrepancy can be explained by low-volume British orders.


Now let's apply this data to operations. This is almost entirely a naval missile, although there is some work to bring back a surface-fired capability that once existed in the 1980s. The USN has 73 Arleigh Burke-class missile destroyers and 13 Ticonderoga-class missile cruisers in service, as well as 4 converted Ohio-class cruise missile submarines and 48 nuclear attack submarines with VLS silos. Obviously the surface units will fill only a portion of their silos with land attack missiles - I understand the load is generally 32 missiles (graphic courtesy Sal Mercogliano). The attack subs have 12 tubes each and the SSGNs have 154 tubes each, all loaded with Tomahawks.


As such to completely load the USN battle force with Tomahawks requires 3,944 missiles. There is thus a shortfall of some 500 missiles, which makes sense given that a portion of the USN battle fleet is in the yard at any given point in time and cannot be made ready to sail even in an emergency.

Now to the question of reloading VLS tubes at sea, a capability which the USN got rid of in the mid-1990s when it was rapidly drawing down after the Cold War and the writing was very much on the wall about how much ammunition Congress was willing to fund going forward. The takeaway here is that the United States Navy doesn't "need" an at-sea VLS reload capability because our current policy appears to be to only buy enough missiles to fill the Navy's magazines once. There will be nothing to reload the silos with, at least in the immediate term, so including extra equipment to do it at sea would be pointless.


As a final aside, given that Tomahawk production since 2021 seems to have been remanufactured rather than new missiles, I have questions about whether the US actually retains the capability to make new missiles of this type.

quote:

There will be nothing to reload the silos with, at least in the immediate term, so including extra equipment to do it at sea would be pointless.

gradenko_2000 posted:

Not that this was the tone taken by the post, but I like the idea of "well actually scrapping all the destroyers tenders was nbd because we were never going to reload the launchers anyway"

quote:

This is almost entirely a naval missile, although there is some work to bring back a surface-fired capability that once existed in the 1980s.

gradenko_2000 posted:

Not that this was the tone taken by the post, but I like the idea of "well actually scrapping all the destroyers tenders was nbd because we were never going to reload the launchers anyway"

Trabisnikof posted:

it is interesting how that mentality first started in the cold war as a way to justify one program over another (we don't need fallout shelters we need more missiles, we'll be dead either way might as well kill more commies) then transitioned to a pure cost cutting argument.

gradenko_2000 posted:

I thought the argument against shelters was that if one side went really all out on them, they might think they could survive, ergo win, a nuclear war, which undermined MAD

Trabisnikof posted:

it is interesting how that mentality first started in the cold war as a way to justify one program over another (we don't need fallout shelters we need more missiles, we'll be dead either way might as well kill more commies) then transitioned to a pure cost cutting argument.

stephenthinkpad posted:

I think its just more excuses to move spending from the military to the contractors. Look, here is the design of a super fancy stealth not-a-tender! Gimme 30 billion to build a prototype.

In other news

https://twitter.com/eNCA/status/1746537492298297578?t=iEKyCaNdOQCmOgurpuUE1g&s=19

quote:

In addition to science hardware, the spaceship is carrying cargo for private clients of Astrobotic, including a sports drink can, a physical Bitcoin, as well as human and animal ashes and DNA.

DancingShade posted:

Why doesn't everyone just keep more missiles and stuff on hand? Simple. It's expensive as hell and they go bad with time.

ModernMajorGeneral posted:

Lmfao

BearsBearsBears posted:

genericnick posted:

sports drink can

Scrree posted:

What's up with the complete inability of western space companies to complete their missions? Is it like the billionaire submariner, where obvious design and materials insufficiency are overlooked because if it does work* the cost saving's will be enormous!!!

* it physically cannot work.

Scrree posted:

What's up with the complete inability of western space companies to complete their missions? Is it like the billionaire submariner, where obvious design and materials insufficiency are overlooked because if it does work* the cost saving's will be enormous!!!

* it physically cannot work.

vyelkin posted:

I posted a lot about this a while back, our reigning ideology doesn't believe in efficacy but it sure as hell believes in efficiency. In this paradigm, even if the government is good at doing something, the lack of competition means it is not the most maximally efficient provider of that service, and you could theoretically have a private provider that offers the same level of service but at a lower cost, because the profit motive will incentivize it to reduce costs somewhere along the way. Of course they don't recognize that doing so completely rewrites the incentives of the provider away from "provide a good service" towards "maximize profit" and how that inevitably affects the service itself, because this paradigm doesn't have room for an understanding that quality is different from profit margin - because again, in their idealized frictionless sphere economy, if the utility provider is low quality and you care about that, you can just switch to the competitor who provides a higher quality service. It's all nonsense, but it's persuasive nonsense because saving money right now is something you can see on a balance sheet while cutting services to the bone in the name of efficiency is usually invisible until oops! we have an emergency and the service collapsed.

Frosted Flake posted:

The Oldest Man posted:

A privatized government service collapsing entirely is really good news because that's creating market opportunities

BearsBearsBears posted:

Scrree posted:

What's up with the complete inability of western space companies to complete their missions? Is it like the billionaire submariner, where obvious design and materials insufficiency are overlooked because if it does work* the cost saving's will be enormous!!!

* it physically cannot work.

stephenthinkpad posted:

I want to give US MIC the benefit of doubt, is there a list of new US weapons that were designed after the cold war, particularly released in the last 2 decades, that are actually good? Like, they will go into textbooks as examples of good weapons, not going into textbooks as examples of bad weapons.