Yes, dirt cheap. Even if you use Hollywood accounting like "flyaway costs" you can get 100 Tomahawks for the cost of one F-35, and the point of the wargame was you only get roughly one sortie per F-35 unless you have air superiority.
So economically its far cheaper to not build one F-35 while buying 100 Tomahawks, then cruise missile every airfield, than to lose your entire stock of F-35 on one sortie.
Another way to phrase it, is every sortie you can either lose all your F-35, or "lose" one by not buying it and carpet bomb every single enemy .mil airfield minutes before the F-35 sortie. It seems pretty obvious which is cheaper, even before we get into pilot training costs and the long length of the .mil pilot training pipeline, etc.
You have to include launcher costs: either an SSGN like the modified Tridents, or the SSNs that carry them. Plus, with an aircraft, you can use it multiple times, and often in unique and unexpected ways. A missile, not so much.
Plus, TLAM isn't expected to be very survivable in a contested environment, especially around S300/S400 sites. That's the impetus for developing the troubled JASSM.
The GLCM launchers got treatied away with the Soviets. The transporter/erector/launcher was a 8x8 MAN truck that had good off-road capabilities. Compared to a sub, they're dirt cheap.
Yep, the INF treaty gutted them, and that's why we rely exclusively on SSGNs, SSNs, and the B1/B52 for delivery. All of which are extremely expensive. We're also range limited with cruise missiles by the same treaty, though I'm not sure if it's still in force since the dissolution of the USSR.
The thing to do is to launch 100 Tomahawks so that you can then use stealth aircraft to trash the SAM sites and interceptor aircraft that reveal themselves to shoot them down.
Once you factor in the entire program cost and logistics footprint, the Tomahawk is the absolute cheapest way the US military has to put a bomb on a specific spot on the map.
That's why we fired 1 tomahawk (on average) every 12 seconds for the entire 48 hours of the opening to the war in Afghanistan. It is mind blowing to think how destructive that was
