In order to weaponize it you’ll probably need to add a high explosive payload, and ships are pretty big targets so you probably want at least a couple hundred pounds of it. Probably need some smarts onboard to keep it gliding autonomously all that way, too. Of course, if you’re aiming at ships, then those will move while you glide there so maybe add some sensors so it can do terminal guidance when it reaches the target area. It would be expensive and take a lot of battery power for every glider to have sensors that can reach 100’s of miles to track the target, and they’d always be blown up at the end of the trip (which seems wasteful), so maybe we can network the weapons and broadcast course corrections to them along the way. We’d hate for the targets to see it coming too early and shoot back, so low observability would also be nice. Of course, all this is starting to sound expensive…and if we’re gonna buy something like that, then maybe it should have a long shelf-life and we should be able to periodically inspect and maintain it so that when we finally use it after 30 years on the shelf, it works exactly as intended.
Looks like the Naval variant costs around 720k, with more baseline variants running ~340k. Considering the weapon was designed in the 90s I'd be curious if a modern version could be done for less money with off the shelf components. Given that China's military costs roughly half the US's for the same gear this also puts this glide bomb in the cost range where anti-missile missiles start to look expensive.
That looks like all up round cost. The per-unit production cost of a weapon is typically much lower, and never really the dominant factor in overall program cost. (Overall costs are dominated by operations & maintenance, followed by R&D.) For example, the FYDP budget request for USN JSOW production shows a flyaway cost of past variants as $225k/unit, and the production cost for C-1 (and maybe -ER, which adds a rocket motor) variants decreasing from $613k to $466k by 2024. (Source: https://www.dacis.com/budget/budget_pdf/FY20/PROC/N/2230_6.p...)
Most weapons use off the shelf components from the time they were designed, and moving to more modern components doesn’t save enough in production cost to justify the cost of redesign, testing and certification processes. If a 90’s chip was “good enough” to meet spec in the 90’s then it’s still good enough in 2021. (Assuming we’re even still building the 90’s variant and not just maintaining existing inventory.)
It doesn’t really sound much like a drone anymore though, more like some kind of “glide bomb”. Hey! Look at that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-154_Joint_Standoff_Weapo...
(FWIW, I mean this in jest, not condescendingly.)