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The article you linked to cites a price of about $250k per round, not $80k/rd, and the government is apparently buying over 7000 rounds. Given the lower purchase quantity and similar technology, a 3x increase for the new round seems believable.

I mean, it's still crazy to be spending so much per round, but it's believable.

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It's probably all tooling costs. We are spending X + 80k/rd, and the counting looks different even if the cost's don't really change.

you're right. Inflation though :) Looking at the history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M982_Excalibur#History - it was well under under $100K in the first years. In that 2015 order of 7.5K units the program cost is $2B with the procurement cost is $790K - looks strange with that $1B+ tucked on that late.

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