On the JAUKUS and Washington's view of Canberra, one year later episode of the USSC Briefing Room, USSC Research Fellow Tom Corben shared this stat on US tomahawk expenditure in the Middle East.
“The first number is 80, the second number is 55, and the third number is 145 per cent. The first number is the approximate number of Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles that were fired by the US Navy at Houthi rebel positions in Yemen in one or two days at the beginning of the Red Sea commercial shipping protection operations...The second number, 55, is the number of Tomahawks that were procured by the US Navy the previous year. And the third number is the percentage of the expenditure rate of those days of operations, compared to the procurement from the previous year. So in other words, in the opening days of the Red Sea operations, the US Navy used 145 per cent of the missiles that it had procured from the previous year. A fourth figure that might be of interest is zero, which is the number of Tomahawks that were procured in the FY25 defense budget.”
“Ideally, Australian industry and government stakeholders would like to see GWEO (Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance Enterprise) get to the point where Australia is capable of manufacturing much of the componentry that goes into the kind of munitions that are likely to be used in high quantities in the Indo-Pacific... In an ideal future, Australia will be capable of either producing complete missiles or producing 90 per cent of the missiles and then procuring the rest of the 10 per cent of the componentry... from the United States, and being directly able to input those missiles into not only Australia’s own force structure requirements, but also backfilling unexpected or expected US shortfalls in their stockpiles.”
Listen to the full episode here: