US targeting its high munition costs
TALK about taking a bazooka to kill a fly: an unnamed ally used a $3.4 million (R42.4m) Patriot missile to shoot down a hostile $200 commercial drone, a US general reported last week.
General David Perkins wanted to point out yet another asymmetric advantage global terrorists’ hold: it costs the West an unconscionable amount of money to combat even the most basic ad hoc threats.
For the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Pentagon stocked up on $500 000 ambush-resistant vehicles and $150 000 bomb-disposal robots for protection against improvised explosives put together for a few hundred dollars. Unmanned aircraft have proved one of the most effective tools in fighting jihadis, but consider the cost of a single strike: a Reaper drone made by General Atomics has a sticker price of $17m, costs at least $2 500 an hour to fly and fires a $100 000 Hellfire Romeo missile.
The US and its allies have spent billions protecting ships off the Horn of Africa from Somali pirates in simple skiffs. Iran sows fear among the lumbering tankers and military ships in the Persian Gulf with its swarms of tiny speedboats. China has more than 100 000 old-fashioned naval mines, while the US Navy’s next generation anti-mine craft, the $450m littoral combat ship, is barely seaworthy.
The Pentagon is aware of these economics. This month, Lockheed announced it had successfully tested a truck-born “directed energy weapon” system – that is, a laser beam – that achieved a 58 kilowatt blast. It is initially expensive, but its cost per use will be negligible. Not like those missiles that cost $100 000 a pop.
Lockheed will start shipping the weaponry to the army within months. Two years ago, the company used a laser with half as much power to blast a truck engine a mile away, and says the new weapon will be effective in downing incoming rockets and drones.
The Navy, which has been testing energy weapons on the amphibious transport ship Ponce in the Persian Gulf, this month decided to forge ahead with its Seasaber 60kw system, which it hopes to deploy by 2020. And the Pentagon’s Missile Defence Agency is experimenting with airborne lasers carried by drones.
The beautiful part of all this expensive machinery: each blast costs about a dollar.
Another attempt to cut back on munitions costs involves the Navy’s stealthy new destroyer, the Zumwalt. A single shell for the destroyer’s 155mm gun system could cost upwards of $1m, making it in effect too valuable to use.
But the Zumwalt is basically a $4 billion floating experiment, and the Navy will use it to test a new electromagnetic railgun, which in theory will fire a 10kg projectile every six seconds at Mach 7, possibly as far as 400km. The technology is a way off – in large part because of the enormous amount of energy the ship would have to produce – but if perfected, it would in theory be able to fire cheap projectiles no more sophisticated than flying anvils.
It seems clear that the military and the “defence industrial base” that feeds on it understand that while weapons will get more expensive, it’s time to watch the bottom line. – Bloomberg View