[El Gato]

Great. Like lobbing a $1.5M rock.

I don't think the unit production cost of either Paveway or JDAM is that high. They are relatively cheap devices.

Here's the numbers for JDAM, probably as of about 2001.

Acquisition unit cost $62,846

Average unit cost (40,000 units) $18,000 current estimate

The first includes amortized R&D, the latter is production cost.

Paveways are a little more expensive, but not much. The same source (globalsecurity.org) shows a unit production cost of $55,600.

So those rocks aren't so expensive after all. But it's still like throwing an intermediate sized car away every time you use one.

[manwiththehands]

Thanks for the info. I just threw the $1.5M out there for the sake of discussion. With our military contractors you never know.