The LRLAPs [Long Range Land-Attack Projectiles] were to have been coordinate-attack weapons, guided by GPS satellite signals and inertial navigation systems to specific points ashore. With a flight time of potentially several minutes over that Long Range, GPS/INS guidance is not generally suitable for prosecuting mobile targets. Indeed, as BAE Systems once briefed me on the cannons—the prosaically-named Advanced Gun System (AGS)—firing at ships was never part of the specification. Then, when the hideously over-budget production run of the Zumwalts was truncated from 32 to three, and thus the guns from 64 to six, the unit price that Lockheed Martin mooted for LRLAPs increased from under $100,000 to nearly one million dollars. Million-dollar multi-purpose missiles, maybe. Million-dollar, single-purpose bullets, probably not.
… The range of the LRLAP would have been somewhere between 70 and 100 nautical miles, as variously reported. To achieve the long range, the shells were to be further propelled outside the barrel by rocket boosters—making the weapon a sort of cannon-rocket hybrid. That range is impressive for a cannon, but it is a bit short for an anti-ship missile these days.
That was Jim Hasik’s blog post, “What about the guns? Part 1: The Zumwalt-class destroyers and their AGS.”
Essentially, Lockheed’s LRLAP production is nearly all fixed costs. Let’s presume the number of projectiles scales with the number of ships/guns. A reduction from 64 guns to 6 guns implies about one-tenth the number of projectiles. But the unit-cost rose by a factor of 10! The total program procurement cost for the LRLAP is virtually the same whether you by enough to meet the requirement of 6 guns or 64 guns!
My estimation is that this is how contractors save face. Troubles in development are generally hidden until most of the funding is sunk. Then, with delays and rising costs, the government reduces program quantities, which gives the contractor the pretext for increasing costs even further because of lower production rates/learning curves. I’m sure some of those effects are real, but it also provides an opportunity to bake in all sorts of other unrealized cost growth.
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