The USS Delbert D. Black fires a Tomahawk missile during Operation Epic Fury in February 2026. As the US has exhausted supplies of Tomahawk missiles, it has sought to develop cheaper and more attritable projectiles to fill the gap. (US Navy)

Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit Seeks Lower-Cost Strike Weapons

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The DIU is working to develop a long-range missile—the so-called “G-BAM”—with a cost in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars, roughly one-tenth the price of an existing Tomahawk.

The United States military now faces critical shortages of much-needed ordnance—notably the Tomahawk cruise missiles, Patriot air defense systems, and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptors. Replenishing the stockpiles of those munitions could take years, and will also cost billions of dollars. The per-unit cost for each Tomahawk cruise missile is around $2.6 million, and following heavy expenditures—where the US Navy fired as many as 1,000 in recent conflicts in the Middle East—the service is now requesting roughly $3 billion to refill its inventories.

Sustaining a lengthy conflict with such ordnance isn’t financially viable. This month the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) launched its “Ground-Based Affordable Mass” (G-BAM) prize challenge, which called on industry to develop and deliver low-cost, long-range precision strike systems that could be ready for both rapid demonstration and then production scaling.

“Existing long-range precision fires remain critical for defeating hardened, defended, and strategically significant targets, but their cost and limited inventories make them difficult to employ at the volume required for sustained operations against a peer adversary,” the G-BAM project description explained.

This isn’t exactly a replacement for the Patriot and other advanced weapon systems, but is meant to complement the capabilities of such platforms with “affordable, scalable........

© The National Interest