"Tomahawk: Vital to the Future of U.S. Seapower" Topic

"With the release of President Obama's budget for fiscal year (FY) 2016, we can now see the priorities this administration has outlined for our country's military. However, the devil is in the details.

At first glance, the military, coming off the precipice of sequestration, has increased its baseline number by $38 USD billion from FY 2015. Nonetheless, digging deeper one sees some disconcerting removals of line item weapon programs that would degrade America's ability to project power in the foreseeable future.

As I continue to re-enforce to my students in my terrorism courses, the world is a dangerous place. We face serious threats from all parts of the globe: a belligerent Russia; a rising China; and the expansion of radical Islamic terrorism throughout the Middle East, Africa and Asia (not to mention the recent terrorist activity in France, Spain, Belgium and England…"
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Amicalement
Armand

Without more info, this sounds completely political and likely paid for by the defense contractor who is selling the missile. The Navy said they have enough, 4000, in stock and want to press ahead with a higher tech replacement design.

Yeah, its very clearly political. At the current rate of usage we have enough Tomahawks to last about 10 years (assuming we don't purchase any more than we already have), possibly longer. Even purchasing just 100 a year should keep us in relatively good supply for a few years before we either have to start purchasing more or make the switch to a new weapon system.

With the SSGNs in service, there are ~616 Tomahawks between those 4 ships. ~12 on each of 53 attack subs for another 636.

So the 57 ships of the submarine fleet carry about a third of the Tomahawks in the entire arsenal.

I wouldn't mind getting some TASMs back in the fleet. Tomahawk Anti-ship missiles. But I'd want a (much) bigger warhead and smaller fuel tank. Subs really don't have any long-range sensors, so an anti-ship missile with a 1500nm range doesn't make much sense. Shoot, even 500nm doesn't make much sense! Bring the range down to about double that of a Harpoon (~200nm max) and put the warhead up to about 2000lbs.

There are 22 Ticos and 61 Burkes, but I'd be surprised if they accounted for more than 800 Tomahawks (~10 per ship). The lone Zumwalt probably accounts for about 40 (80 cells, ~40 Tomahawks, ~20 Standard Missiles, ~8 Harpoons, ~8 ASROCS, and ~16 ESSMs because ESSMs get quad-packed).

So that accounts for about half of the 4000 Tomahawks in the inventory, assigned to ships. Which means the other half is "loose" reloads. While it's true that only about a third of the ships are deployed at any given time, that still means that there is very little combat reserve.

If the US got into another significant Tomahawk shooting event, we would pretty quickly run out! Basically, the deployed ships of the USN have 4 full volleys of Tomahawks available to them.

Don't need allot of reloads it you run out of targets. The flaw in the logic is that because of positioning and the reality of modern war, while you have allot of launchers, most will never, ever fire a single missile in anger. So, for the few that actually get to shoot, you have lots of potential reloads.

During the entire Gulf War I shock and awe 297 were used! So, we can have 13.46 more of those wars before we run out. Pretty safe margin there.

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