December 16, 2022

More Missiles!

The compromise National Defense Authorization Act has just been released, bringing with it a better idea of where Congress is sending things. And in a shocking development, they appear to have actually been paying attention to the war in Ukraine. One of the lessons (entirely predictable by anyone who has been paying attention for the last century or so) is that war goes through a lot of munitions very quickly, and nobody has enough laying around. This showed even quite early, as we saw the rate of Javelin expenditure, and has become even more apparent in recent days, as Russia has seen its stocks of cruise missiles dwindle to almost nothing. And Congress has responded by...significantly increasing munitions procurement pretty much across the board.

They're embracing multi-year buys covering the next 5 years, and doubling or tripling the planned procurement rates. LRASM goes from 3811 to 950 missiles. SM-6 is going from 744 to 1500. NSM is set to rise to 1250 weapons, and while there isn't clear planning in the FY23 budget request (the FY22 budget lists numbers in the 30s), 250 missiles/year is listed there as the cap on production.

Of course, there's some confusing news mixed in with the good. First, the numbers above are just what's authorized under the multi-year deal, and there's no guarantee that they'll be funded to those limits. The weapons on the list are also slightly weird, at least from the naval side. Tomahawk isn't listed, and doesn't seem to have gotten any boost over the procurement request in the defense budget, while Harpoon is slated for 2,600 weapons. That's more than a bit strange given that the US hasn't bought new ones in decades and it's generally on its way out. A cynic might suggest that Boeing (or its Congresscritters) insisted on being given a slice of the new missile pie, although in fairness, it could also be weapons intended for foreign sale, maybe to a certain quasi-country in the South China Sea.

It's also worth taking a look at the effects on the fleet, which I wrote about earlier in the year. As predicted, the final NDAA is considerably more generous than the Navy's initial plan, adding a Burke, a Constellation, an oiler and two "Expeditionary Medical Ships" in addition to the Navy's initial request for two Burkes, two Virginias, a Constellation, a San Antonio class LPD , an oiler and a salvage tug. Half of the Navy's proposed cuts have been reversed, forcing them to keep four Whidbey Island class LSDs, five of the LCS-1s, one Tico and two expeditionary transfer docks. This isn't too unexpected, although I would have cut the "Expeditionary Medical Ships" (versions of the EPF designed to keep the good people of Alabama in pork) and been a lot more sympathetic to the Navy's desire to cut the LCS-1 fleet.

But the headline takeaway in all of this is that Congress is finally taking seriously the problem of building up the US arsenal, which is a very good thing. I've been saying for years that the biggest gap in the US arsenal is the size of our munitions stockpile, because we have over a century of evidence that industrial warfare will burn through stocks very quickly, and I'd much rather the US was the second combatant to run out of munitions rather than the first.


1 Before numbers from the FY23 presidential budget.

Comments

  1. December 16, 2022DuskStar said...

    2600 Harpoons sounds like a ton. Does the budget say what kind they are? (Would air launch vs surface launch vs sub launch be visible in this?)

  2. December 17, 2022DampOctopus said...

    What effect does this increase in order volume have on the per-unit price? Does it go down, because of economies of scale? Or up, because they have to compete against other industries to secure key components?

  3. December 17, 2022Anonymous said...

    Another important thing is surge capacity, the ability to massively increase production rapidly because keeping to wartime production when you're not fighting is just wasting money on weapons that will never be used.

  4. December 17, 2022bean said...

    @DuskStar

    It does not, and it wouldn't be visible at this level. It's even possible that some of them are SLAMs. As I said, that seems a baffling decision to me.

    @DampOctopus

    It will reduce the price. There's a lot of overhead in most military procurement, and running the line faster spreads that out. Even if some component prices go up, a lot of others will go down due to volume.

    @Anonymous

    Surge capability is important, but given the state of the arsenal, I'd rather we focused right now on buying more missiles today.

  5. December 17, 2022Doctorpat said...

    Based on the numbers that have been thrown around for the past 10 months, even the planned surge capacity is usually much lower than the actual usage rate once even a regional war starts going in ernest.

    The reasons are fairly clear: cost. Setting up a 1000 missiles/year line that can be run to give peace time numbers of 100 per year is much cheaper than setting up a 10 000 missile/year line. And that would be very difficult to run at 100 per year.

    And then a war starts and it turns out that usage rate is 1000/week.

  6. December 18, 2022AlexT said...

    a war starts and it turns out that usage rate is 1000/week

    I wonder if this is true wrt precision munitions. The bottleneck there seems to be more about targeting, with actual volume fired not that high. Especially as dispersion becomes mandatory for everyone and any large static targets are likely wiped out in the opening salvo. Cheap, dumb saturation attacks might become the norm relatively quickly, with the expensive smart weapons held in reserve for whenever anyone gets a lucky peek at something juicy.

  7. December 18, 2022Bernd said...

    How storable are modern missiles? It seems like the minuteman missiles can sit in their silos for decades with only a single propellant swap, so presumably Standards can be kept as easily?

    In that case it doesn't seem like constant low-rate production with stockpiling is any worse than building production up to the maximum foreseen usage rate.
    It's much cheaper, and ammo depots are far easier to disperse than a 10 kilomissile/yr superfactory that would be an incredibly tempting target in any war where you were using missiles at that rate.

  8. December 18, 2022Hugh Fisher said...

    AlexT, the current Russia-Ukraine war is providing good evidence. In the opening stages of the war Russia was firing 30+ long range guided missiles (Iskanders, Kalibrs) a day; and that's when they were trying to limit the damage. More recent reports from Ukraine are Russia firing 50+ long range missiles in a single day. (Not every day, because they're probably running low.)

    200-300 a week, around 1,000 a month. Even so, this looks low compared to the rate at which both Russia and Ukraine are/were using unguided artillery shells, hundreds to thousands each day.

    Back in March, after the initial few weeks of fighting, the Ukrainians were asking for missiles at an expected usage rate of 500 Javelins per day, along with 500 Stingers per day. I'm not sure they actually receive enough for that rate, but they're getting missile shipments by the thousands and finding ways to use them.

    Source: Perun's YouTube video on cruise & ballistic missiles in Ukraine, the 500 a day Stingers/Javelins was widely reported in Western media in March. Also a more recent report "Preliminary Lessons in Warfighting" by the Royal United Services Institute for the war up to July, which doesn't go into detailed numbers but makes the same point.

  9. December 18, 2022Anonymous said...

    Doctorpat:

    Based on the numbers that have been thrown around for the past 10 months, even the planned surge capacity is usually much lower than the actual usage rate once even a regional war starts going in ernest.

    In practice most of the surge capacity would come from quickly converting factories making other stuff into munitions factories.

    Bernd:

    In that case it doesn't seem like constant low-rate production with stockpiling is any worse than building production up to the maximum foreseen usage rate.

    You want a stockpile big enough that it can last until extra production capacity can come online.

    Hugh Fisher:

    200-300 a week, around 1,000 a month. Even so, this looks low compared to the rate at which both Russia and Ukraine are/were using unguided artillery shells, hundreds to thousands each day.

    Those things are pretty simple, the main bottleneck is likely to be whether your chemical industry can produce the propellants and explosives in the quantities required.

  10. December 18, 2022Lambert said...

    In practice most of the surge capacity would come from quickly converting factories making other stuff into munitions factories. That worked fine in the 40s but could you do it today?

    Especially if we’re talking about a situation where TSMC is a pile of rubble.

    (Since i tripleposted by mistake I hope it's no more work for Bean if I make a fourth but with correct formatting this time)

  11. December 18, 2022bean said...

    This is a case where the sloth of the defense procurement system actually helps. We can build the relevant chips anywhere. No need for TMSC.

    (More practically, I am skeptical of surge capability. Military production has gotten more sophisticated and more specialized, and that means it's going to be hard to get anything other than the basics from converted industry.)

  12. December 19, 2022Anonymous said...

    bean:

    Military production has gotten more sophisticated and more specialized

    So has everything else.

  13. December 19, 2022bean said...

    Yes, but that just means that those other specialized production lines aren't very suitable for building missiles. We build things different than they used to, and it's a lot harder to shift production around to the extent that was possible in WWII.

  14. December 19, 2022Emilio said...

    TSMC is opening new plants in the US, and I would be surprised if the plants in Taiwan are not mined.

  15. December 20, 2022cassander said...

    On the subject of usage rates, the history of artillery usage suggests that the number used will be "as many as are available".

  16. December 20, 2022Basil Marte said...

    cassander:

    The big lesson of WW1 was that there is such a thing as too much dakka.

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