Offloading the 20-year-old weapon system to Kiev would allow the United States to save around $20 million annually in maintenance costs, a Sputnik correspondent’s analysis of a Pentagon report on the JSOW program showed.
When US President Joe Biden unveiled the latest package of military aid, with an estimated value of $375 million, for Ukraine on Thursday, he introduced the JSOW air-launched glide bombs as the new weapon that would enhance Kiev’s long-range strike capabilities.
First deployed in 1999, the JSOW system includes a number of variants. The baseline configuration, known as the AGM-154A, carries the 145 BLU-97 submunitions, which are a type of munitions used as cluster bombs.
Due to concerns over the cluster munition’s potential harm to civilians, additional variants, including the AGM-154B with six BLU-108B/B canisters and the AGM-154C variant incorporating a 500-pound warhead, were introduced. A later variant, known as the AGM-154C-1, was a network-enabled weapon capable of attacking stationary land and moving maritime targets.
According to media reports, Ukraine is expected to receive the baseline AGM-154A variant, with an effective range of 14 miles, when launched at low-altitude, and 80 miles, when launched at high-altitude.
While the JSOW system, especially when launched at high altitude, would help improve the effective strike range of Ukraine’s F-16 fighter jets, delivering the aging weapons, which were designed to have a service life of 20 years, could also help the US military save millions of dollars each year on maintenance costs.
According to an unclassified Pentagon report on the JSOW program released in March 2015, the US military decided to terminate the procurement of the latest variant of the JSOW, known as AGM-154C-1, after the fiscal year 2015.
The termination of JSOW procurement drove up the average unit cost of the AGM-154A by as much as 20%, forcing the US military to reduce the number of missiles procured by 817.
The US Navy and the US Air Force bought a total of 2,517 units of the AGM-154A, compared to the original plan of 3,334 units, the Pentagon report showed.
According to the report, most of the AGM-154A units for the US Navy and the US Air Force were produced before 2005. As the AGM-154A is designed to have a service life of 20 years, most units of this JSOW variant under the US stockpile are expected to expire in the near future.
In addition, the Pentagon report estimated that the operating and support costs of the 2,517 units of the AGM-154A would reach a staggering $20.2 million each year.
Sending the expiring AGM-154A variant to Ukraine would essentially allow the US military to offload a weapon system it decided to phase out from 2015 and save millions of dollars in operating and support costs annually.
The US military has a stockpile of 3,185 units of the AGM-154C variant, with an estimated annual maintenance cost of $95 million, the Pentagon report showed. The average cost of the AGM-154C variant was driven up by the procurement termination as much as 45%, forcing the US military to scale back the number of units purchased from 7,000 to 3,185.