I want to come back to an article from the weekly headlines real quickly:
The Ukrainians have submitted similar lists in recent weeks but a recent request provided to US lawmakers appears to reflect a growing need for American-made Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and Javelin anti-tank missiles — with Ukraine saying it urgently needs 500 of each, daily.
… By March 7, less than two weeks into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the US and other NATO members had sent about 17,000 anti-tank missiles and 2,000 anti-aircraft missiles into Ukraine… the United Kingdom announced it would ship 6,000 more missiles, including anti-tank and high explosive weapons, to Ukraine
And then there’s more Javelins on the way: “An $800 million security package announced March 16 included 800 Stinger and 2,000 Javelin systems.”
500 Javelins and Stingers a day is quite a lot. Focusing on the Javelins, what is the Ukrainian requirement? Here’s some data reported by the JPost between February 24 and March 27, a 31 day period:
The Ukrainian military claimed on Sunday morning that Russia had lost 582 tanks, 1,664 armored vehicles, 294 artillery pieces, 93 multiple launch rocket systems (MLRS), 52 anti-aircraft systems, 1,144 other ground vehicles and 73 fuel tankers.
Putting all those ground vehicles together, you get a total of 3,902 ground vehicles destroyed at an average of 126 per day. While Ukraine will take as much as it can get, a 500-per-day requirement of Javelins is perhaps a little high but not as unreasonable as it may first sound. I wonder what the success rate of the Javelins is? I also wonder how many training rounds are shot, or if they send green troops in with Javelins but never test firing one?
One Javelin kill for every three launched doesn’t sound particularly unreasonable. But Ukraine shouldn’t be launching Javelins at every armored vehicle — it is a quite expensive and advanced system designed to hit heavily armored tanks from above. A “fire-and-forget” weapon.
The cost and production of the Javelin make is clear that Ukraine should husband them for more heavily armored vehicles. Here’s a table from the Comptroller’s FY22 Weapons Book:
Ukraine is asking for more Javelins in a day that the United States requested in all of FY22. I’d be interested to see what the appropriations committee marks did to the Javelin, there was a lot of talk of replenishing supplies, as well as in the FY23 request. [Update: the FY23 budget request shows 586 Javelins at $181.5M, or $309M each… I’d guess that foreign military sales of the Javelin are not included here.]
Putting the numbers together, the unit cost of a Javelin system including the launcher was $320K in FY2020 dropping to $200K in FY22 request. How much is a missile round cost, and what part of the system is reuseable? The Weapons Book says: “The system consists of a reusable command launch unit (CLU) and a modular missile encased in a disposable launch tube assembly.” Would be convenient to have a WBS breakout of the costs to see what is disposed and what is a continuing asset.
Anyhow, it is difficult to imagine production of Javelins ramping up 100-fold or more to meet the Ukrainian requirement. If you needed 500 Javelins a day, you’d have to produce a total of 182,500 Javelins in one year. That could cost a whopping $37 billion at $200K each. We can presume that the price gets cut in half or a quarter due to production rate and learning, but not too much more than that I’d expect.
Switchblade 300s loitering munitions from AeroVironment, for example, cost about $6,000 per unit. That’s just 3% of the cost of a Javelin are can be used for anti-personnel vehicles. [Update #2: I’m told by a reliable source that they cost $60K, open source reporting dropped a zero… that changes the analysis by an order of magnitude. The Switchblade 600 costs $240K and is anti-armor, so closer to a Javelin.] What’s the cost-effectiveness tradeoff between them? That is actually a question relevant for systems analysis. Another question is the rate of improvement by the Javelin vs. loitering munitions.
One of the real lessons here for the United States is that it needs to focus on scalability of its weapons production in the event of a hot conflict. Ukraine could be tame relative to a fight the US finds itself in. Yet the acquisition system prefers buying major platforms like ships and aircraft, even if it doesn’t have enough munitions to fire from them. Stockpiling munitions is probably a good bet, high end conflicts might move to dumb bombs pretty fast without it. But as technology races ahead, perhaps flexibility to ramp up new systems like the Switchblade provide a good alternative.
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