Just a couple of things...

I would guess that a Tomahawk would be overkill for that mission, but I don't make the choices either.

Here's a quick explanation on 'surplus'...

It turns out that the two MTW requirement went away about a year ago, so the next POM cycle will use a different method. Go figure, I understood that way...

The way it use to work is like this... every theater has a basic load. That load is what a full scale war will use in x-number of days (say 30). By full-scale war, that means that the computer models fire the weapons off the platforms as fast as they can. That is an amazing amount of ammo. So much ammo, that it is unrealistic, as you run out of targets long before you run out of ammo. Think of how fast something like a MLRS can fire its load... it could empty all its ammo in less than five minutes easily. Think of how fast you see them shoot on the news. Not even close to as fast as they can. They run out of targets (a telephone pole going downrange carries a lot of submunitions and takes out a lot of things at once). That is the baseline. Once you hit 90% of that (ie, spent a LOT of ammo), you request resupply. That resupply can either come from in theater stocks (yes, they have excess ammo stashed in case of emergency), another theater, or the CONUS stocks. From what I can gather, we have a stupid amount of ammo stockpiled CONUS.

The reason we have so much stockpiled is because of minimum production rates. Any production facility needs to keep the lines moving. If you stop the lines, the price per unit skyrockets. To keep that from happening with really important stuff (like ammo), the government has a minimum that they have the ATKs produce per month. This builds up, because even if they have surplus, the government charges the services to fire those weapons. During the late 90s we didn't exactly go through a lot of tank rounds, or other ground vehicles (like MLRS or Bradleys).

That means it is a surplus. Know what is funny (since it is your tax dollars at work)? It is cheaper to have this surplus than to stop the lines and start them again.

Boeing is the second largest defense contractor - Lockheed Martin is the largest. If the Northrop Grumman / TRW deal ever goes through, they will become number one.