I Will Survive

The Strategy Page ^ | 1/25/2010 | The Strategy Page

[ErnstStavroBlofeld]

The U.S. Air Force has ordered 160 AGM-158 JASSM air-to-ground missiles. These will cost about $1.5 million each, and several dozen of them will be shipped off to South Korea, which expected to get them last year. JASSM has been delayed due to test failures. However, tests late last year were over 90 percent successful. That kind of good news has arrived just in time. For the last three years, the U.S. Department of Defense has been on the verge of cancelling the $6 billion JASSM cruise missile program. Lobbying, pleading, a large order from South Korea, and the growing possibility that the missile would be used against Iranian, Chinese or North Korean air defense systems, gave the program a few more lives.

The only problem JASSM has was that, well, it often didn't work. Until last year, the tests had been mostly failures. But the manufacturer was able to identify all the problems, and convinced the government that these were the result of poor manufacturing. This issue, the builder promised, was fixed. As a result of this, sixteen more missiles, taken from those manufactured as part of the first order, were tested. If most, or even a large minority, of them had failed, JASSM would have been dead.

JASSM is the third family of GPS guided smart bombs to be developed. The original JDAM bomb kit (added to 500, 1,000 and 2,000 pound bombs), cost $26,000 each. The longer range JSOW (JDAM with wings and more powerful guidance system), cost $460,000 each. The even longer range JASSM cost over half a million dollars (the 400 kilometers version) to over a million dollars (the 900 kilometer JASSM ER) each. Then there is the SDB (Small Diameter Bomb), a 250 pound JDAM that can also punch through concrete bunkers