Why can’t Lockheed and Raytheon simply make way more of them?
The problem is not technological, it’s political and economical. We know how to scale the production (it’s really 20th century tech), the Congress just doesn’t give the funds. Half a billion dollars for a new plant is not really that large a figure for a country which spends over a trillion dollars on defense annually, but the priorities are not there (or maybe I could have said “the lobbyists are not there” but I don’t want to go deep into politics).
E.g., Raytheon claims to have the capacity to produce 600 Tomahawks per year but have orders for only ~100 (for reference, ~170 Tomahawks spent on Iran so far cost ~$600M). I guess (but have not checked) it’s more or less similar with the other munitions you list.
Except for the period between Vietnam and Yugoslavia, the US historically went into wars without significant stockpiles of munitions, and either ended the war before they ran out or used the industrial capability to ramp up production in the process
The problem is not technological, it’s political and economical. We know how to scale the production (it’s really 20th century tech), the Congress just doesn’t give the funds. Half a billion dollars for a new plant is not really that large a figure for a country which spends over a trillion dollars on defense annually, but the priorities are not there (or maybe I could have said “the lobbyists are not there” but I don’t want to go deep into politics).
E.g., Raytheon claims to have the capacity to produce 600 Tomahawks per year but have orders for only ~100 (for reference, ~170 Tomahawks spent on Iran so far cost ~$600M). I guess (but have not checked) it’s more or less similar with the other munitions you list.
Except for the period between Vietnam and Yugoslavia, the US historically went into wars without significant stockpiles of munitions, and either ended the war before they ran out or used the industrial capability to ramp up production in the process