USS Zumwalt ammo is expensive!!!

[eddie]

This new ships ammo for its guns is really spendy, at $800,000 to $1 Million a piece. Ship can carry 600 rounds, but how do you afford that,lol

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-navy-called-uss-zumwalt-a-warship-batman-would-drive-but-at-dollar800000-per-round-its-ammo-is-too-pricey-to-fire/ar-AAk2EVy

[Oberon]

Why do we keep doing this to ourselves?! :nope:

[Jimbuna]

A simple fix.....do as the Royal Navy does and send the ships out on patrol with near-empty magazines.

[eddie]

A simple fix.....do as the Royal Navy does and send the ships out on patrol with near-empty magazines.

LOL

[AndyJWest]

It has guns? I thought that it was designed on the principle that if you make something ugly enough, the enemy will run away before you have to fire a shot. :03:

[eddie]

yeah it has guns,lol 155mm to be exact. These new rounds are actually a missile. The Navy wanted to order 28 of these ships at first, but with a price tag of $4 Billion a piece they had to trim the order back to three. They were quoted a price of $50K a piece for the rounds if they bought 28 ships, but the price jumped when they cut back the order for 3 ships. Get us coming and going on this deal!

[kraznyi_oktjabr]

A simple fix.....do as the Royal Navy does and send the ships out on patrol with near-empty magazines.Do we have any evidence, that U.S. Navy ships actually carry more than planned to use amount of ammunition, bombs and missiles? Lets say for Burke four ESSMs (just in case) couple of Tomahawks and maybe even Harpoon or two and handful of RAMs. You know bluffing in major scale. :yep:

[mapuc]

The first news agency who came with this story was RT.

Markus

[Jimbuna]

Do we have any evidence, that U.S. Navy ships actually carry more than planned to use amount of ammunition, bombs and missiles? Lets say for Burke four ESSMs (just in case) couple of Tomahawks and maybe even Harpoon or two and handful of RAMs. You know bluffing in major scale. :yep:

Could rely on the honesty of an answer from whoever becomes POTUS tomorrow? :hmmm:

[Mr Quatro]

$800,000 dollars each!

Just load them up and print more money that we borrow from China ... :hmmm:

[em2nought]

$800,000 dollars each!

Just load them up and print more money that we borrow from China ... :hmmm:

Or retrofit a quarter of the fleet into Bering Sea gold hunters. :03:

[Platapus]

So LMC won the contract by bidding $50,000 cost per round and after getting the contract, they "discovered" that the actual cost would be $800,000 and no one is going to jail?

I best some LMC exec got a huge bonus for pulling this off.

[Jimbuna]

Could be someone was given an 'under the table' licence to print money.

[Oberon]

Could fill the front with concrete and use it as a ram I guess. :hmmm:

[davis20]

Saw it on sea trials the other day. Here is a pic. http://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20161111/7d26ce568ec67935c1eec96d200a8365.jpg

Sent from my SM-G920V using Tapatalk

[Mike Abberton]

This situation is, at least in part, an unfortunate factor in the way the US government procures new products. They wrap a lot of the R&D and the initial tooling/production setup costs, which are a fixed dollar amount, into the first batch of weapons ordered.

So originally, they were going to have 28 ships and something like 650 rounds per ship.

28 x 650 = 18,200 rounds x $50K/round = $910M

Some portion (probably a substantial one) of that $910M is the fixed amount and some is the pure per unit cost.

In the meantime, the US Navy reconsiders the program and downgrades the initial order to 2000 rounds, but it still has to pay all the fixed costs. That's how the per unit cost jumps to $800K-$1M per round. Now, being a brand new type of round, I am sure the $50K was an ambitious number to begin with, but it's not like the pure per round unit cost increased by 1500%-2000%. If there was a follow-on order for Zumwalt rounds, they would not likely be $800K each (but probably not $50K either).

The same thing happened to the F-22, is happening to the F-35, and to a bunch of other big government programs. The bigger the jump in technology, the more likely these things are.