A Tomahawk Costs $2 Million. Here’s Who Gets Paid to Replace It.

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Estimates from Anadolu news agency put the first 24 hours of Operation Epic Fury at approximately $779 million. That number dominated the headlines. The number that didn’t was the replenishment bill — the procurement and financial pipeline that started the moment the first missile left its launcher. It flows not to the Treasury but to a small, identifiable set of contractors whose names were already written into contract documents years before the strikes began.

This article traces that pipeline: who holds the contracts, how funds move through prime contractors and their sub-tier suppliers, what production limits control how quickly stockpiles can be rebuilt, and where the oversight structure handles these questions unevenly. The answer to “who gets paid?” was set long before the first strike. It was built into contract architecture, industrial base decisions, and appropriations law.

The Tomahawk Block V carries an official FY2026 unit cost of $2.5 million, though contract prices range from $1.75 million to $4.1 million depending on variant and order size. Lockheed Martin’s JASSM-ER is the stealthy standoff missile that Air Force and Navy aircraft carry into defended airspace. U.S. procurement figures place it at $1.4 to $1.6 million per unit, with exact current-year figures not publicly confirmed. Boeing’s GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator is the 30,000-pound bunker buster that only a B-2 Spirit can carry. It is so specialized that production contracts have historically run in the tens of millions for small lots, meaning per-unit costs that far exceed even the Tomahawk.

Beyond the $779 million opening-day figure, another $630 million had already been spent on moving forces into position before the strikes. That total included a dozen-plus naval vessels repositioned, aircraft moved across the region, and two Carrier Strike Groups burning through roughly $6.5 million per day each to operate in the region. The replenishment bill flows not to the Treasury but to a small, identifiable set of contractors whose names appear in USASpending.gov records and whose stock prices surged the moment the strikes began.

The Procurement Architecture Pre-Selects the Winners

The question of who gets paid to replace expended munitions is not an open question. It was answered in advance, in contract documents, by a procurement architecture that reflects a clear policy choice to use sole-source contracts when only one qualified manufacturer exists. That structure puts speed and industrial base stability ahead of competitive pricing. Defense economists have debated that tradeoff for decades.

Supporters argue that sole-source arrangements preserve specialized production lines that would otherwise be too costly to maintain. They also keep technical expertise in place and allow replenishment orders to flow within days rather than the months a new competition would require. Critics argue that the lack of competitive pressure drives up unit costs and reduces contractor incentives to invest in efficiency. Both concerns are backed by real evidence.

What is not in dispute is the practical result: at the point of replenishment, the government does not choose among suppliers. The supplier was chosen years earlier.

RTX Corporation, the company formed when Raytheon merged with United Technologies in 2020, holds the exclusive contract to build Tomahawks. RTX manufactures both the land-attack and ship-targeting versions across all current production blocks. On February 4, 2026, three weeks before Operation Epic Fury commenced, RTX announced a major long-term deal with the Pentagon to increase Tomahawk production to over 1,000 units annually. That is a more than tenfold increase from the previous baseline.

The agreement spans seven years. For the next seven years, the government has committed to a guaranteed order volume large enough for RTX to keep production lines, workforce, and supply chain relationships at historically high rates.

The February 2026 RTX agreement came roughly three weeks before Operation Epic Fury. That timing is worth examining carefully rather than assuming. The available evidence points toward routine planning rather than advance knowledge. The Pentagon’s recognition that U.S. Munitions stockpiles were inadequate for high-intensity conflict predates the Iran operation by years.

The FY2026 President’s Budget request, submitted in early 2025, included explicit funding lines for Tomahawk production expansion.

The FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act directed the Secretary of Defense to develop a plan for increasing cruise missile production rates. Congressional testimony from the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment in 2024 specifically identified Tomahawk stockpile depth as a readiness concern. That concern was based on lessons learned from Ukraine. Congress approved and funded this expansion in the FY2026 defense budget before any Iran operation was publicly contemplated.

Multi-year munitions expansion agreements of this kind are driven by years of documented stockpile shortfall analysis and congressional mandates. The February announcement marked the end of a contracting process that had been underway for many months. What Operation Epic Fury changed was not the existence of the expansion agreement but the urgency of acting on it. The strikes gave Congress both the reason and the political push to fund replenishment at the scale the agreement envisioned.

For JASSM-ER missiles, the arrangement runs parallel. Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, headquartered in Grand Prairie, Texas, holds the primary production contract. In March 2026, one week after the opening strikes, Lockheed Martin received an addition to its existing contract worth $122.6 million to ramp up JASSM production. The company had already invested in a new 225,000-square-foot production facility in 2022. That facility features robotic paint lines and automated testing, built specifically to increase JASSM quantities. Those facilities now run at higher usage rates as demand spikes.

Neither RTX nor Lockheed Martin competed for these orders at the point of replacement procurement. Both hold sole-source contracts that automatically kick in when missiles are used up. The government does not hold a new competition asking “Who wants to build Tomahawks?” because RTX is, by law and contract design, the sole source for non-nuclear Tomahawk variants. Federal contracting rules allow the government to skip competitive bidding when only one company can do the job and no alternative will work. For a Tomahawk, that standard is met automatically. The replenishment pipeline is built into the contract architecture itself.

RTX’s Tomahawk production operates under an open-ended contract framework. The government sets a maximum total value, a per-unit price, and delivery terms, then places orders as needed over the life of the contract. The seven-year duration means the Pentagon can spend replenishment money under an existing contract far faster than if it needed to start a new procurement action from scratch. The money moves quickly because the legal structure was already in place.

The Sub-Tier Supply Chain Behind Prime Contractors

Tracing the money from Congress’s budget vote to the company’s bank account requires going one level deeper.

When RTX receives a Tomahawk replenishment order, it does not manufacture every component in-house. The propulsion system is critical to the missile’s roughly 1,000-mile range and subsonic cruise profile. It comes from Williams International, a Michigan-based engine manufacturer that produces the F107 turbofan engine (the jet engine that powers the missile) used in Tomahawk variants. Williams has held this engine contract for decades. A replacement order automatically triggers a turbofan engine order from Williams International. That revenue does not appear in RTX’s contract ceiling. It flows through RTX’s books as a subcontract, and Williams takes its profit at that tier.

Guidance and navigation systems add another layer. The Block V missiles incorporate GPS-plus-backup navigation. Contractors supply GPS receiver units and backup navigation sensors that keep the missile on course even when GPS is jammed. A final-approach guidance system lets the missile identify and home in on its exact target. It requires software and sensor work across multiple subcontractors.

Warhead production flows to ordnance specialists. The explosive charge, detonation triggers, and reinforced outer shell all require specialized manufacturing. An order for 100 replacement cruise missiles automatically generates orders for 100 warheads, each triggering revenue through the ordnance supply chain.

The revenue math is worth spelling out. If the U.S. Military replaces 500 expended Tomahawks at $2.5 million per unit, that is a $1.25 billion order. RTX takes its cut as the lead contractor, including revenue from final assembly, perhaps 30 to 40 percent of the unit price. Williams International takes turbofan engine revenue. Ordnance suppliers take warhead revenue. Electronics contractors take guidance system revenue. Sub-tier suppliers of specialty materials take their portions.

The total $1.25 billion flows through dozens of companies, each taking their cut at their tier. Stock price reporting misses this. A spike in RTX share price represents not just RTX profits but the spread of replenishment revenue through an entire ecosystem.

The sharpest constraint lives at this sub-tier level.

Reports suggest that lead contractors often don’t know what’s happening two or three levels down their supply chain. If Williams International cannot surge turbofan engine production because of material sourcing problems or labor limits, the entire Tomahawk pipeline stalls — not because RTX cannot build the missile body, but because the engine subcontractor cannot supply the critical component. These dynamics become visible when production surge timelines slip.

The sharpest bottleneck in the broader munitions industrial base involves solid rocket motors. While cruise missiles like Tomahawk rely on turbofan engines, many other precision weapons depend on solid rocket motors for boost or terminal guidance phases. The U.S. has three primary solid rocket motor manufacturers — Northrop Grumman, L3Harris, and Anduril, which became the third domestic supplier — and all depend on a limited set of suppliers for explosive chemicals. In 2021, a single explosion at a black powder mill in Minden, Louisiana, effectively halted U.S. solid rocket propellant production for nearly two years. This forced manufacturers to draw down stockpiles and delay deliveries. That episode showed how a disruption at a sub-tier supplier ripples through the entire munitions industrial base. No amount of funding or contractor effort can speed up production if the raw materials are not available.

The FY2026 defense appropriations bill included three separate appropriations lines for the solid rocket motor industrial base: $400 million for emerging SRM makers and their supply chains, $200 million for the broader solid rocket motor industrial base, and $100 million for development of a second solid rocket motor source for Navy air defense and anti-ship missiles. These are not abstract investments. They represent the government paying suppliers to expand capacity and approve secondary sources. But officially certifying new suppliers as approved typically takes 18 to 24 months. That means the munitions shortage risks that exist in March 2026 will not be resolved until mid-2027 or 2028 at the earliest.

What the U.S. Can Produce, and When

The following table shows the key munitions expended in Operation Epic Fury, their manufacturers, and the production constraints that govern how quickly the U.S. Can restock.

Sources: Tomahawk production data; JASSM production capacity; RTX production expansion agreement. Unit costs are approximate and vary by production lot and fiscal year.

Before the expansion agreement, the minimum rate for Tomahawk production was approximately 90 missiles per year, the minimum needed to keep the production line running and suppliers on board. Running one shift per day yielded roughly 250 missiles per year. RTX’s new agreement targets over 1,000 annually, requiring a second shift and greater facility use. But 1,000 missiles per year still comes to about 20 per week. If Operation Epic Fury used, conservatively, 200 Tomahawks in the opening 72 hours, restocking would require approximately 2.5 weeks of full production at surge rates. That assumes no other customers, no production disruptions, and no supply chain friction.

Other customers do exist. Japan has contracted to purchase 400 Tomahawk missiles (200 Block IV and 200 Block V All Up Rounds) through Foreign Military Sales, the formal U.S. Program for selling weapons to allied governments, in a contract valued at approximately $2.35 billion. The United Kingdom is upgrading its Tomahawk inventory to Block V standard through a £265 million contract. Naval units tasked with other regional missions maintain their own replenishment requirements. Production never occurs at theoretical maximum rates. Quality control delays, supplier issues, labor availability, and the ordinary friction of accelerating manufacturing all take their toll.

For JASSM-ER, production limits are equally binding. The Air Force requested 550 JASSMs in its Fiscal Year 2025 budget request and 550 again in fiscal 2026. If the Air Force used 100 JASSM-ER missiles in Operation Epic Fury, a conservative estimate for a four-day high-intensity air campaign, restocking at current production rates would use up two to three months of output. That assumes no competing demands. There are always competing demands.

Congressional Oversight: Financial Disclosures and Defense Contractor Holdings

Beyond a certain dollar threshold, replenishment orders require congressional appropriations. The Pentagon can use reserve funds and emergency spending powers for immediate orders, allowing contracts to move within days of inventory depletion. But sustained restocking at scale requires legislation, and that is where the political layer meets the procurement layer.

The Senate Armed Services Committee and House Armed Services Committee have primary authority over defense authorization. The Senate and House Appropriations Subcommittees on Defense have authority over the actual funding. These four committees, and the members who chair and rank them, will decide whether emergency funding bills are passed to pay for Tomahawk and JASSM-ER replacement.

Senate Armed Services is currently chaired by Senator Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi), with Senator Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island) as the top Democrat on the committee. On March 3, 2026, four days into the operation, Wicker told reporters that supplemental funding for munitions and military operations in the Middle East was already being discussed. “We’re talking about that, and that will undoubtedly be discussed at the all-members brief this week, hopefully today,” Wicker said. He added he would be “receptive to their arguments” if the Pentagon requested supplemental funds. The timeline is already in motion.

Reports on congressional financial disclosures show that more than 50 members of Congress hold stock in defense contractors, with total household holdings potentially exceeding $10.9 million. At least three senators on the Senate Armed Services Committee hold disclosed positions in major defense contractors.

During the 2024 election cycle, employees of major defense contractors and their political action committees (PACs, the fundraising arms of companies and industries) gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the members who oversee defense appropriations. Wicker received between $343,065 and over $534,000 in defense industry contributions depending on how broadly donors are categorized. Reed, by some measures the top Senate recipient of military contractor cash in the cycle, received over $590,000. Both received contributions from companies including Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics. These are the exact companies whose revenue will increase through replenishment orders.

Financial disclosures filed with the Senate reveal additional details. Former Senator Tom Carper’s spouse reported holdings in Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse previously reported Lockheed Martin shares. These holdings are disclosed as required by law. But they remain part of household wealth that grows in value as companies’ stock prices rise. That dynamic occurs reliably when companies announce surge orders backed by supplemental appropriations. As we reported in our coverage of defense stock movements following the strikes, RTX and Lockheed Martin both hit 52-week highs on the first post-strike trading day.

Before drawing conclusions from these figures, the strongest counterarguments deserve serious attention. First, disclosed defense contractor holdings across 50-plus members represent a small fraction of total congressional net worth, which runs into the hundreds of millions across the body. Individual positions are often modest relative to a legislator’s overall financial picture.

Second, defense contractor exposure is nearly universal among diversified investors. Any member of Congress holding a broad index fund through a retirement account almost has indirect exposure to RTX, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing, which are components of the S&P 500. Singling out direct disclosed holdings without a baseline comparison to the broader investor population can overstate how unusual congressional ownership is.

Third, recusal mechanisms exist: members can and occasionally do step aside from votes where financial conflicts are clear. The Ethics in Government Act’s disclosure requirements were specifically designed to make such conflicts visible.

Fourth, political scientists who have studied roll-call voting behavior have found weak and inconsistent evidence that personal stock holdings predict how members vote on defense authorizations. The main predictors remain party affiliation, constituency characteristics, and committee assignment. Fifth, the campaign contribution figures, while notable, are legal, fully disclosed, and modest relative to contributions from other industries. Defense PAC contributions are generally outranked by finance, health, and other sectors in aggregate, though for members sitting on Armed Services and Defense Appropriations committees specifically, defense ranks among their top sources.

Under current law, no technical violation occurs. Federal law allows members of Congress to own stock in companies affected by legislation, provided holdings are disclosed. The assumption built into this legal structure is that transparency provides a sufficient check: if voters know a legislator holds stock in a contractor they are voting to fund, the political process will correct for it.

Whether that assumption holds in practice is a different question. The financial connections are buried across dozens of individual disclosure filings rather than compiled anywhere easy to find, and a vote for replenishment appropriations can always be framed as necessary national security spending.

What makes the structural alignment worth scrutiny, even after accounting for these counterpoints, is not any individual holding or contribution in isolation. It is the combination of concentrated voting authority, sole-source contract architecture, and the automatic financial benefit that flows to a small number of identifiable companies when replenishment appropriations pass. That benefit goes to shareholders, including some of the legislators casting those votes.

The concern is not that any member is trading on inside information or voting corruptly in the legal sense. It is that the oversight structure asks legislators to judge spending decisions in which they hold a financial stake, however modest. The existing disclosure-based remedy may be less effective when the political framing of a vote makes conflict-motivated dissent nearly impossible to express. Votes for replenishment appropriations can be framed as supporting the troops and rebuilding the arsenal. That structural question is separate from any allegation of individual wrongdoing. It is the question the current legal framework leaves most incompletely answered.

This Has Happened Before. The Potential Scale Is New.

After the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. had fired 288 Tomahawk cruise missiles. How that figure compared to prior cruise missile usage across the preceding decade is not reliably documented in open sources. Each missile cost approximately $569,000 in 1999 dollars. Congressional supplemental appropriations passed within months to restock expended inventories. The defense industrial base expanded production. The contractors involved took the replacement revenue.

During Operation Iraqi Freedom, approximately 800–802 Tomahawks were fired, with 725 representing a floor figure cited by Gen. Richard Myers rather than a comprehensive count. Supplemental appropriations flowed regularly to restock inventory. Raytheon’s Tomahawk business grew significantly. Production lines remained active throughout the conflict and extended for years afterward to rebuild stockpiles. In the 2011 Libya intervention, over 110 Tomahawks were fired in the opening phase alone. Of approximately $1 billion in total supplemental costs for the Libya operation, roughly $340 million flowed to munitions procurement, predominantly Tomahawks.

Each of these precedents shows the same pattern: conflict drives munitions expenditure; Congress appropriates replacement funds; contractors surge production; shareholders and employees of contractors benefit. The financial interest alignment existed in all of those prior conflicts, and none of the mechanisms are new to Operation Epic Fury.

What may be different now is scale and speed. If operations continue for approximately four weeks or less, as President Trump suggested, and if daily munitions consumption stays near opening-day rates, the Pentagon could deplete inventory stocks faster than any previous operation except the opening phase of the Iraq invasion.

Early estimates from the Penn Wharton Budget Model, an independent economic research group at the University of Pennsylvania, put direct military costs of Operation Epic Fury at $65 billion, with a range from $40 billion to $95 billion depending on duration and scope. Munitions replenishment will represent a portion of this total, possibly $5 to $15 billion. The precise figure depends on classified inventory data and how long the operation runs.

The money flows faster and the decisions compress into shorter timeframes. The concentration of replenishment revenue among a small number of sole-source contractors becomes more visible than it has ever been. That visibility creates an opportunity for careful public accounting of contract terms, production timelines, and oversight mechanisms. Historically, that accounting has followed major munitions expenditures only after the fact.

Industrial Base Surge Limits: Why Replenishment Takes Years

The question war reporting almost never asks: can the industrial base respond in time to matter strategically?

The answer is no — not as fast as the weapons are being used. The pre-strike Tomahawk stockpile was, by some defense analysts’ estimates, sufficient for only a limited period of sustained high-intensity operations. Operation Epic Fury compressed that consumption into hours rather than weeks. The production expansion RTX announced in February targets 1,000 missiles per year. That sounds impressive until you consider that 1,000 missiles per year is roughly 20 per week. The opening days of this operation may have used multiples of that in a single day.

The Pentagon has recognized this constraint structure for years. The Munitions Acceleration Council, a Pentagon body set up in late 2025 to coordinate faster weapons production, suddenly faced its first real-world test in early March 2026. The FY2026 appropriations bill included substantial investments in the solid rocket motor industrial base. Planners understood that the sub-tier supplier bottlenecks, not the prime contractors, were the actual limiting factor. But as noted above, approving new suppliers takes 18 to 24 months. The Tomahawk production expansion agreements, signed in February 2026, will not produce added capacity until 2027 or 2028; January 2026 investment agreements covered other systems, including THAAD.

This creates a strategic vulnerability that is separate from, and in some ways more serious than, the financial interest questions. If the U.S. Uses precision munitions at high rates in a conflict against Iran while also maintaining military forces positioned to deter conflict in the Pacific, the U.S. Could run dangerously short of missiles. Defense analysts have noted that Tomahawks consumed in the Middle East are Tomahawks not available for potential contingencies elsewhere. The replenishment timeline, measured in months and years, does not close that gap quickly.

The contractors will get paid. Production lines will surge. Subcontractors will receive work orders. Williams International will build more turbofan engines. Ordnance suppliers will expand warhead production. Shareholders will see earnings estimates revised upward. What remains genuinely unresolved is whether the production capacity the U.S. is now paying to build will be enough to maintain strategic deterrence during the years it takes to rebuild what was used — capacity being built at historically high rates, through sole-source contracts with a handful of companies.

The more important policy uncertainty is whether production surge timelines can restore strategic stockpile adequacy before a second contingency arises. Those timelines are limited by sub-tier supplier bottlenecks in turbofan engines, composite materials, and explosive chemicals.

Contract awards and financial disclosures receive regular public reporting. Sub-tier industrial base capacity and cross-theater stockpile adequacy remain largely outside the public record — and closing that gap is the more manageable near-term policy problem.

For a broader look at the economic disruptions rippling outward from the strikes, including the European gas price spike — which ranged from roughly 25 percent to over 50 percent across the first two days of March depending on the measurement window — and Iran’s threats to close the Strait of Hormuz, see our coverage of how American shale producers and airlines are faring as the conflict continues.

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