Why are the U.S. armed forces running out of Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles?
Conventional wisdom says that the Tomahawk, after being such a popular weapon for so many years, should be well-stocked in the inventory.
The Tomahawk is one of the Navy’s most effective attack capabilities and has been a deep-strike weapon of choice for many commanders during conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria.
But for more than two years, the U.S. Navy had been firing the missiles faster than the defense industry can replace them. According to the Navy, the opening strikes in 2024 of the escalating conflict in Yemen expended more than 80 Tomahawks to hit 30 targets.
I put the question of Tomahawk shortages to a long-time colleague who works for a major U.S. missile manufacturer. Why, I asked, does the U.S. Navy find itself running out of Tomahawk cruise missiles?
The US Navy’s Dilemma: How Many Tomahawks Are Enough
He answered by describing for me what it is like to be on the industry side of trying to make sure the Navy is receiving the number of missiles that it needs, as well as producing the munitions when they are needed.
“The U.S. defense industry has a long-standing history of getting burned by the U.S. government,” he explained. “We naively believe what we are told when the services tell us that they need more missiles sooner and then they ask us to build excess capacity.
“So, we go ahead and build more brick-and-mortar buildings, hire additional people, build up capacity, etc. Then about the time we are ready to cut the ribbon on a new assembly site or some other expansion of capacity the USG says to us, ‘oops, we were just kidding – never mind.’
“That leaves us not only holding the bag,” he concluded, “but with a lot of bad news to distribute and messes to clean up that the U.S. government created for us. So, you can understand why when one of the services says ‘we need surge capacity in our production line’ we immediately think of the old fable about ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf.’
“This is a case of pathetic, p*ss-poor planning and an even worse understanding of how the U.S. defense industry operates.”
Blame the Japanese?
The consequence is that production lines for some of the most important weapons in the armed forces’ arsenal have been stuck at the lowest possible production tempo for some time now.
As an assessment from a year ago concluded, the minimum sustainment rate to keep production lines running is 90 Tomahawks per year. But the Army and Marine Corps are barely sustaining that production with their buys of experimental land-launched versions of the missile. Meanwhile, in 2023 the entire annual Tomahawk purchase of 55 missiles accounted for 68 percent of the precision munitions fired at the Houthis in just one day.
In an effort to try and boost the production level, the Navy has been working to increase annual production of Tomahawks by trying to expand export sales to allies. But it remains to be seen just how much additional production capacity this could create in the long run.
But returning to my colleague’s dismal assessment of the situation, even if the Navy wanted to buy more missiles, the problem remains that industry could probably not surge to meet demand.
Defense production in the United States has been stuck in this kind of “just-in-time and no more than this” model for decades now. “If you want to blame someone,” said a senior executive from one of the leading U.S. defense firms who spoke to 19FortyFive, “blame the Japanese.
“They are the ones who made everyone believe that you never spend a nickel on excess stock that you do not need right this very moment and that supply chains would never be disrupted and cause your production plan to collapse like a house of cards.”
As the above-cited 2024 assessment reads, the result has been “fluctuating Tomahawk buys that have led to unstable production rates and poor business planning for the industry and its suppliers. Uneven demand has materialized in production bottlenecks of key components like rocket motors, which make it difficult to surge production.”
Each new Tomahawk has a two-year lead time to build due to the slow production rate. True to form, Navy documents obtained by news organizations show that orders from 2023 are not expected to start delivery until January 2025.
And what will be the production tempo? Just five missiles per month, according to the same documents.
Some government entities never learn, and some things never change.
About the Author:
Reuben F. Johnson is a survivor of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and is now an Expert on Foreign Military Affairs with the Fundacja im. Kazimierza Pułaskiego in Warsaw. He has been a consultant to the Pentagon, several NATO governments and the Australian government in the fields of defense technology and weapon systems design. Over the past 30 years he has resided in and reported from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Brazil, the People’s Republic of China and Australia.
