The rate at which the U.S. military has used the Tomahawk missiles in the Iran war has reportedly prompted internal talks about increasing supplies

Some Pentagon officials are concerned about the “alarmingly low” supply of Tomahawk missiles remaining in the U.S. military’s arsenal after firing 850 of the weapons into Iran, according to a report.

The rate at which the U.S. military has used the Tomahawk missiles in President Donald Trump’s war in Iran, now in its fourth week, has prompted internal talks about increasing supplies, according to The Washington Post.

U.S. officials told the newspaper that the number of Tomahawks left in the Middle East was “alarmingly low.” Another official told the outlet that the U.S. supply of Tomahawks was closing in on “Winchester,” military slang that means almost out of ammunition.

  • kreskin@lemmy.world
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    2 hours ago

    those are about 3 million each, in pre trump funds. Looks like tax paying Americans will all be emptying or wallets and cutting services to replace those now too. I hope Israel is happy with us and sends our politicians a tiny fraction of that amount in bribes.

    • anugeshtu@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a gun nut or at all pro war, but why do they produce multimillion dollar missiles consisting of metal, fuel and explosives for that much for a one-way use instead of using that money to prevent wars? Well, call me a sweet summer child.

    • krisevol@lemmus.org
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      2 hours ago

      If china get Taiwan the US is going into the stone age overnight. No president is trying to avoid this, both parties want to protect Taiwan.

    • poop@lemmy.zip
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      2 hours ago

      Or yet another excuse of why they can’t help there own citizens. “Universal health care? You know how much that would cost???”

  • JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org
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    17 hours ago

    That really is the best opportunity for China to take Taiwan. Wait a little bit longer until stockpiles are empty and ground troops are deployed and then strike while the USA is occupied

    • BillCheddar@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      Why would China bother?

      China is about to become what America was: #1 country, #1 economy, with oil traded in their currency, with resources available across the globe.

      China’s investments in Trump are about to pay off huge.

      Why fuck with a winning hand by invading a small island when they can just keep doing what they’re doing, and let Taiwan make semiconductors for China, and collect all the benefits of being Top Dog?

      • jellygoose@lemmy.ca
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        3 hours ago

        Already kinda is, it feels like.

        I’m Canadian; most people here seemed extremely happy to see our PM in China making actual deals and opening up trade.

        • BillCheddar@lemmy.world
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          3 hours ago

          That’s exactly why I am 99% sure that everything with Trump and the Republicans will eventually point back to China. That’s who benefits from all the chaos, all the corruption.

          Russia is a nice red herring, but China is using them and will discard them as soon as it is convenient.

      • Mr_WorldlyWiseman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        2 hours ago

        If that was true, why are they still saber rattling? Stupid dictators and bloodthirsty supporters lead to stupid wars, so I wouldn’t count it out.

        Look at Ukraine. Russia had already de facto annexed most of the land that they hold today. Ukraine wasn’t willing to fight them to get it back. All of Russia’s neighbors were too scared to join EU or NATO. Europe was dependent on Russian gas and vulnerable to Russian coercion.

        Putin started the war anyways.

        Four years later and hundreds of thousands of soldiers dead, and the economy is crashing. Ukraine is bombing the shit out of Russia and occupied Ukraine and trying to take it all back. Oligarchs are going poor/dying. NATO now has a much larger budget than the Russian military, arguably stronger than it ever was during the Cold War. Putin has no way out of this war, if he withdraws he probably ends up in the Hague.

        If he had stopped after 2014, Putin could have kept everything, but he kept breaking the ceasefires and escalating.

        • BillCheddar@lemmy.world
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          1 hour ago

          Because it costs them nothing to saber rattle?

          What they’re doing is working, so they’re going to keep doing it.

      • Asfalttikyntaja@sopuli.xyz
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        4 hours ago

        This is exactly from a book of Sun Zu, sit back and watch your enemies fight with each other’s and you will win without shooting a single shot.

    • timbuck2themoon@sh.itjust.works
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      14 hours ago

      If China wasn’t dealing with unknowns in their military due to corruption I think they definitely would. Still might.

    • spacesatan@leminal.space
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      2 hours ago

      The US doesn’t even formally recognized Taiwan. We were never going to enter a conventional war against a nuclear power for their sake.

      *and actually now would be the worst time for them to invade. Trump is probably one of the only presidents dumb and chaotic enough to actually get into a conventional war with China. Along with Taiwan’s relevance as ‘the global chip factory’ fading they’d be much better off waiting a few years.

      **hello downvoters. general consensus among military wonks is that China would rinse the US if the US intervened in an invasion of ROC. You see how the Iran war is going? Now imagine if they had a much larger missile arsenal, ICBMs, hypersonic glide vehicles, and an actual air force. In-theater conventional war greatly favors China and the US does not have enough long range capability to change that without going nuclear which obviously precludes the whole thing to anyone sane.

        • spacesatan@leminal.space
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          16 hours ago

          losing 60% of global microchip production (and dropping) or some Dongfeng-5Bs putting the US into the fallout universe timeline. It’s not a great choice but it’s a relatively easy one.

  • azureskypirate@lemmy.zip
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    20 hours ago

    They bombed a bunker months ago, now there’s a bunch of tomahawk missles deployed; Is The Dept. of War getting ideas from Top Gun: Maverick? /s

    • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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      20 hours ago

      Take away the /s. In the first term, Steve Mnuchin was…Treasury, I think. Anyway, he’s a movie producer, on the financing side. Look up his list of credits. The things you describe sound exactly like his kinds of movies. Mnuchin was probably encouraging Trump, so he could later make a movie about it “based on a true story.”

  • metakrakalaka@lemmychan.org
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    22 hours ago

    AI says these cost $1.3 million each on the low end.

    That’s at least another billion dollars wasted on Israel that could’ve been spent helping Americans.

    • some_designer_dude@lemmy.world
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      22 hours ago

      I cannot imagine there’s actually $1.3M of anything in these missiles. They’re probably a few grand and then about $1.3M of mark-up.

      • BillCheddar@lemmy.world
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        4 hours ago

        It’s a missile that you can fire from one country and hit a specific building in another country.

        Can’t just go out and put some Playstation parts and TNT into a tube and call it good. A million+ per missile makes sense.

      • Atomic@sh.itjust.works
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        16 hours ago

        It’s not just what’s inside them. It’s the entire process of making them. There are a lot of people involved that all want to be paid for their work.

        Ofc the price you sell them for is higher than the cost of making them. But they’re still very expensive to make.

      • Mantzy81@aussie.zone
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        18 hours ago

        As a former Gov contractor who now works for gov, yes. Price always goes up for government contracts.

  • merc@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    So, apparently there’s a term that’s used in the defence industry for advanced, extremely capable, very expensive weapons: “exquisite weapons”. This sounds like something out of a fantasy RPG, but it’s actually the term they use in the industry to talk about these things, the Tomahawk being one of them.

    So, while Iran is hitting various sites around the middle east with machines that cost about the same as a small car and are built in a basic factory, the US is spending 100x as much, building missiles in special high-tech factories using clean rooms and high end robots. Not only that, but the weapons the US is using to intercept Iran’s drones cost about 100x as much as the drones they’re shooting down.