news

these bombs are big but they aren't exactly high tech

Mechanical complexity isn't always a good metric for overall cost - something that's technically simple in terms of number of parts can still be expensive because of the cost of those individual parts. I'm not a specialist in manufacturing or anything, but I would assume part of the difficulty with tungsten is even being able to actually work with it in the first place - you need the kind of tools that can actually cut into it (although when you just need a big solid chunk for a bomb it's probably not so bad). Plus, there's just the plain physical limitation of how much material exists - if I have a trillion dollars, it doesn't mean I can buy 41 thousand Abrams tanks, because only like 10k were actually built and they stopped in '92. Now, obviously tungsten isn't that limited, but this is just for illustrative purposes.

I bet the bombs themselves are not even a significant portion of the cost of these strikes

This seems intuitively true, but I'm not sure if it holds up. What I'm finding is anywhere from 13 million, to 20 million, to a vague "tens of millions" for the GBUs, per-unit.

(btw, the M10 I'm finding as somewhere between 14 to 19 million depending on the specific phase of contract negotiations, an AMPV is ostensibly a mere 3.1 mil, adjusted for inflation, while a Stryker is... 6.9 mil?! for an 8-wheel APC, basically a fancy BTR, presumably much simpler than a tracked and better-armored vehicle like the AMPV? Maybe the unit cost listed on Wikipedia is for one of the fancier Stryker variants or something, but holy shit it must be great to be General Dynamics and bilk the military that much... anyway, clearly the "nothing compared to the complexity of mass producing vehicles like the ones you cited" point doesn't hold - again, it seems intuitively true, like "it's just a bomb, how much could it cost?", but you gotta factor in the MIC graft! Even the latest Abrams is a "mere" 26.4 mil (again, adjusted for inflation), which could be merely twice as expensive as the GBU on the lower estimate, or cheaper on the higher estimate if that "tens of millions" is above 30)

A B-2 flight-hour is anywhere from 135k to 170k (flight-hour costs do actually include logistics and maintenance, sort of - what they do is take the total cost of the whole fleet over a given period of time, and divide it by the hours, so you don't necessarily get a good idea of how much the maintenance costs proportionally to the regular flight of the plane, but it is accounted for in the whole cost as an average), which for the 37 hours long mission, taking the lower estimate, is like 5 mil per plane - with each carrying 2 bombs, and taking the lower estimate for the bombs too, that's 2.6 times the cost of the flight for the payload. Now, there's probably a bit more subtlety and nuance to calculating this stuff, but this is just to give a rough idea.

For the whole thing, obviously there were a lot of other planes involved, and calculating the precise costs of everything isn't really possible at this point - we don't know exactly what other planes flew, from which bases, how far, etc. But for example, an F-35 flight hour is supposed to be somewhere from 33k to 42k (I'm giving up on doing inflation adjustments at this point ), an F-16's 25k, I'm not finding numbers for the EA-18G Growler but the regular F/A-18 is 19.5k, and obviously these planes, not being strategic bombers, would have flown much shorter missions. There's also various recon and refueling aircraft... let's, just for the sake of a very rough estimate, call it as 118 F-35s (125 - the 7 B-2s, not realistic at all but just to keep it simple), at the lower estimate - that's 3.9 mil per hour, and the actual main portion of the operation, involving all aircraft together, wouldn't have lasted more than a few hours, right? So like, I dunno, 5 hours, like 20 mil? Possibly the cost of just one GBU, depending on which estimate we're going by.

So, turns out the bombs weren't that small of a portion of the cost - gotta factor in the MIC graft!

Finally, a point I started making before I actually drove myself insane looking up the numbers and assumed the bombs actually were a paltry portion - even if they don't seemingly cost as much (which as we've seen, they actually do), we still have to account for decline in manufacturing. I feel like a lot of people don't realize that the US is, to a great degree, coasting by on the stuff they made in the late Cold War and the 90s. Westerners love to shit on Russia for "oh, they're not really making that many new tanks, it's just refurbs!", but... the US does the same thing - an Abrams hasn't rolled off the assembly line since '92! Everything has been refurbs of the original 10k they made during the Cold War. The B-2? Last one was made in 2000. The Bradleys were mostly all made before 1995.

Just because the US of the 80s and 90s was able to make thousands of tanks and IFVs, doesn't mean the US of today can. The US of the back then might well have been able to pump out a whole lot of these bombs (or whatever the equivalent with that period's technology would have been). The US of today... maybe not.