Just curious why they cost so much. A million bucks a pop seems kind of pricey.
Go ask UPS or FedEx how much same-day delivery to Bahgdad is and whether or not the delivery and detonation of the deliverperson and package is guaranteed. If it is less then the cost of a cruise missle, well you could save the government millions.
Well, for starters, it’s a jet airplane. In comparison to other jet airplanes, it seems pretty cheap to me.
Yea, and if you consider that it’s being procurred by the Pentagon it has to have several toilet seats on it at $600 a pop!
You do have a point there. That is some really expensive technology. I wouldn’t be suprised if they were not even figuring the cost of R&D into it at all. A rebuild on a single jet engine for a light jet can cost several hundred thousand dollars. Then, you have precision guidance systems, custom computers, and state of the art explosives.
Doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.
Of course, Jets often cost much more than they ought because Congress sometimes wants them bought with overly-limited numbers, rather than picking a design and sticking with it for 20 years.
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- For one thing, jet engines are expensive. The jet engine used in the AGM-86 cruise missile is a small 18-inch diameter turbofan that produces about 600 lbs of thrust at around 600 miles per hour. At one time there was one place that was offering functional engines made of sub-spec mil-rejected parts for half a million dollars each. If you go search the price for a new engine for a business jet, you’ll find it’s not out of line with what civilian jet engines cost.
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- For one thing, jet engines are expensive. The jet engine used in the AGM-86 cruise missile is a small 18-inch diameter turbofan that produces about 600 lbs of thrust at around 600 miles per hour. At one time there was one place that was offering functional engines made of sub-spec mil-rejected parts for half a million dollars each. If you go search the price for a new engine for a business jet, you’ll find it’s not out of line with what civilian jet engines cost.
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So this cruise missile engine is actually engineered to a spec to be able to go for millions of miles (with maintenance) if it weren’t destined to be destroyed?
I’d bet it is engineered to that spec, or close, for a couple of reasons. First, they probably reuse a lot of what is available on the market, which is going to be engineered to a low-maintenance spec. Second, even though it only travels a thousand miles or so, it requires extremely high reliability for that duration. If you didn’t need a high degree of reliability and accuracy in placing the ordnance package, you wouldn’t be using a cruise missile.
It’s a government project, ya know? 
I recall reading about some guy (Bruce Simpson?) who decided to try to build a cruise missile on the cheap. (ie, < $5000).
I don’t know if the website says as much, but IIRC he got shut down at one point by the local government. He was using a pulsejet for propulsion, which is small, simple and light. After that, you just need hardware similar to large scale remote control airplanes, and add a computer with GPS and some custom software to control it (the hardest part IMHO, but similar stuff has been done.)
What is it about them, specifically, that makes the cost so high. What part of the engineering of something they make over and over is real expensive.
Cruise missiles (besides being jets) also have the ability to drop submunitions on target before diving/detonating themselves. Also, they have to be pretty accurate, have to fly nap of the earth and be reasonably undetectable and have the ability to be launched from a variety of platforms (I’m thinking of the Tomahawk here). So, its a pretty sophisticated vehicle with some pretty sophisticated abilities.
The big thing though is that its a lot cheaper (both in terms of money and in terms of lives) than sending in a fighter/bomber to do the same job. COULD they be cheaper…probably. But this is the government we are talking about. I’d say they are about as cheap as we could reasonably expect the government procurement system to make them.
-XT
They’re flying, exploding robots! Of course they’re going to be expensive.
There’s a lot of machinist labor in making an engine. No matter how many you make, you still don’t get to use injection molded plastic for the stators, and aluminum castings for the rotors.
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- Because of the high-strength materials that must be used, jet engines are inherently expensive. There is no way to make them cheap. It’s not so much the bearings as it is the high-strength steels that have to be used for the rotor stages–most metals are not strong and fatigue-resistant enough and the few that are available are difficult to work with.
…A car turbocharger could be seen as a simple type of jet engine, the rotors of them are made of the same general class of nickel-based steels and there’s only two rotors in a car turbocharger (compressor and exhaust) and they often measure less than 2.5 inches across. Yet a car turbocharger costs $1000-$1500 to replace, and those two little Iconel rotors are a big part of that cost.
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- Because of the high-strength materials that must be used, jet engines are inherently expensive. There is no way to make them cheap. It’s not so much the bearings as it is the high-strength steels that have to be used for the rotor stages–most metals are not strong and fatigue-resistant enough and the few that are available are difficult to work with.
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Of course, cruise missles are subject to the same economic rules as any other military hardware: In general, nobody gets promoted for saying “No, really, we don’t need the fancy model, just give us the cheaper one.”
And certainly nobody gets post-early-retirement job offers from military contractors for doing so.
To be fair, the health care profession has many similar economic rules.
Note that a cruise missile isn’t just a propulsion system and the payload package. A major part of the development of modern cruise missiles is the guidence and navigation systems and onboard sensor package. While Tomahawks can and do navigate via GPS, they can also navigate strictly by inertial guidance and hone in on the target via visual recognition without operator control or external guidance of any sort, after being launch from any given position within vehicle range. As complicated as G&N systems are on modern ICBMs, they are fired from a fixed location and deliver their payload ballistically (after some amount of navigation in the post-boost phase). Cruise missiles, on the other hand, actually have to guide themselves all the way to the target while flying nap-of-the-earth and evading obstacles, and have a reasonably low signature along the way.
So you’re not just paying for the body, engine, and the payload; you’re also paying for the development of a highly complex robot brain that does virtually everything a human pilot can. Given the training cost of a human pilot being somewhere on the order of $2M before they’re ready to drop a single bomb on a target, $500k-$1m really isn’t bad for a kamikaze pilot who’ll fly in any conditions and crash his plane into a building at mission terminus.
Cruise missiles aren’t used-or at least aren’t intended to be used–for standard strategic bombing. They are deep penetration high precision weapons intended to be used against specific targets like air fields, ammo depots, SAM batteries, and the like. For what they do, they are essentially irreplacable, even with stealth fighter-bombers and world-arching ICBMs.
Stranger
I’ve worked for DOD contractors…not cruise missles, but flight control systems for manned aircraft and remotely piloted/pilotless drones.
First off, compared to consumer products there is about zero economy of scale at work. These things are ordered and made in the low hundreds, not thousands.
The documentation burden on all DOD stuff is horrific. Every single part has to be documented to the point that it’s source, date of manufacturer, etc. can be traced should a defective one be found. All the documentation for each weapon is kept, so that ones with supposedly defective parts can be tracked down.
If the paperwork gets messed up, which is not uncommon, either the parts have to be scrapped, or a whole bunch of replacement paperwork has to be generated.
This is just paperwork for production. There are also troubleshooting manuals, operational manuals, etc. etc. etc. that have to be generated.
There is a whole boatload of hurdles for the design and verifcation process. The process typically gets stopped and restarted a few times due to congressional funding bottlenecks. By the time the design is accepted there will probably be several parts in the system that are obsolete. You either have to keep paying the engineers who designed and understand the system, or pay for a bunch of new engineers to come up to speed on what the engineers who got layed off designed before the last funding snafu.
Production is overseen by an agency called DCAS who are the most anal bunch you’d ever want to meet. They will, for example, require several thousand dollars worth of paperwork to eliminate an extra washer from a bill of materials. (I have actually seen this)
Every single electronic part is tested at temperature extremes, and given an operational burn-in period before installation (which it can, and is argued actually degrades reliability).
In the case of microprocessors, the part is probably obsolete before the mil-spec version is available. Thus you have to buy from very small production runs at exceedingly high prices. Because the designe acceptance procedure is so expensive, you want to buy the same thing 5 years later when you make the next batch…so you have to pay, say intel, a bunch of money to ressurect the obsolete part for you. As late as 1988 I was trying to track down specific vaccum tubes, and also trying to track down a blueprint that showed the dial lettering on an associated test fixture, because the lables had been distroyed by the dust removal process. This because the US AirForce wanted a spare box for an aircraft last produced in the '50s. You can bet that box was horrindiously expensive if it ever got built (I changed jobs…the above project WAS a factor in that)
To try to get around this, the military has established special military processors. So you have to hire from a small pool of expensive engineers and programmers who are experienced with the niche product. They tryed to make one universal processor and one programming language that could be used for everything. Fine, but that means it is optimal for nothing.
But still, parts become obsolete, so you have to keep a bunch of engineers on staff to track down substituions, redesign stuff where exact replacement is not possible, write and cunduct test procedures to verify that the new part works as well or better than the obsolete stuff.
There is an extensive series of acceptance testing that every single missle will have to pass. Depending on the failure, the whole test may have to be repeated after a failure is repaired/corrected.
Another thing that drives up the price on a cruise missile vs. a plane or commercial design is that they’re intended for long storage, without maintenance and be ready to fire at a moment’s notice. Without any signifigant risk of having any of the flammibles involved with the unit leaking, or self-igniting, or spontaneously combusting. That kind of safety engineering isn’t cheap. But it’s kinda important, there are at least two submarines I can think of, off the top of my head, that have been sunk by their own munitions. (Kursk, Sidon, and while it’s still a bit controversial, Scorpion, too. Links for the ‘hot running torpedo’ theory are at the end of the Kursk article. If one allows subs sunk by accidents involving Soviet ICBM problems the number goes up further.)
I think it can be assumed to be “triple nine” reliability or even higher. What that means is that the reliability percentage for the unit, as a whole, is 99.9% safe. Which means that the product of all the reliability numbers involved with construction of the unit have to be greater than 99.9% target. In general for every additional nine added to the reliability number, you’re talking about an order of magnitude increase in price. That sort of thing eats into the amortization of costs.
Another factor keeping the cost high is, IIRC during the Clinton years the manufacturing facility was shut down, and then had to be restarted when Clinton becan using Tomohawks up faster than had been expected. Mothballing a manufacturing facility (or several) is expensive, compared to just shutting it down and dismantling it.
Finally, I can’t be sure, but I’ve heard that there’s guaranteed profit built into the contracts for a lot of military hardware of this nature: If the gov’t buys one unit, the cost will be Y^2; if the gov’t buys X units, the cost per unit is Y; once the gov’t buys 2X units, the price goes down to 0.75Y; if the gov’t ends up buying more than 3X units the price drops to a minimum of 0.25Y, with Y being adjusted for inflation as time goes on.
Also, comparing the computing power in a Tomohawk to a civilian PC isn’t quite accurate: the military has good reason for hating transistors. The damned things are susceptible to shock damage. For a home PC, not an issue. For a car meant for use on improved roads, not much of an issue. For something that’s supposed to be maintenance free until needed - it’s a major issue.
Kevbo pretty much covered it.
I wanted to add that there’s another factor: the government doesn’t buy them like retail items. As far as I understand government contracting (and currently I am employe by a gov’t contractor, but not actually handling contracts), there is no “list price” for a cruise missile like the Tomahawk or ALCM.
Instead there are many, many contracts to purchase parts, design and engineer, buil, and provide services (record-keeping, maintenance, compliance management, all kinds of things) lumped under some umbrella program for which the DoD gets funding.
When someone tries to determine how much a single missile costs, it’s not even as easy as the rather dubious method of dividing the program bottomline cost by the number of missiles delivered to the government. First one has to make determinations about what is fairly included in that “bottomline program cost”. Are things left out of the program cost because they are covered elsewhere? How to factor in costs the missile program shares with other programs for things like storage, compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (and all the other special laws), overhead costs?
The programs cost a lot of money; not very many missiles are produced. It’s pretty hard to acurrately nail down a cost-per-bang, though.
Interestingly, although I cannot provide an online citation for this, historian John Keegan describes the cost of the V-1 “buzz bomb”, the first cruise missile, as being insignificant (I forget, but it was like 50 British pounds or 50 American dollars, 1944 money). This was in his either his book Intelligence in War or The Second World War (I recently reread both). So the first cruise missles were dirt cheap. Even given that they were not very effective, they offered a lot of bang per buck.
Modern missiles are expensive only in terms of cash costs though – they’re politically cheap because they don’t expose troops, and (in theory) don’t cause as much collateral damage as indiscriminate bombing. If you have more money than political goodwill, the precision and “crew safety” cruise missiles offer is “cheap”.
Sailboat