If anyone is curious apparently 152mm rounds cost about $1000. So that would have been $12 billion dollars in sales for NK if true.
Edit: sidenote, the 155mm NATO uses cost around $4000/ round...
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2025
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The US manufactures them for considerably less than $4k/round.
https://www.reddit.com/r/army/comments/u9012h/how_much_does_a_155mm_m795_round_cost/
Much of the difference in funding will come from cuts to the M795 high explosive round, the Army's standard combat projectile. Under the budget request, procurement funding for the M795 would be $61.8 million in FY-22, down from the $145.6 million appropriated for FY-21.
The budget request would provide for the Army to buy 75,357 M795 rounds, which would support training and the service's war reserve.
So after math that’s about $820 a round
IIRC the EU is paying something like $4k for their domestic production, which I assume may relate to the fact that they're building new capacity and paying for it out of the shell price.
The price of a 155mm shell produced in Western Europe ranges from a low of $5,000 to more than $10,000 for the high-end ammunition, a senior industry executive attending the round table told Defense News.
Apparently the costs skyrocketed after the start of the war do to supply. The NATO commissioner quoted $8489.60 and the U.S. Army rep said we were paying $3,000 a round for new ones. So that original quote in 2021 was when demand was lower and supplies were still sitting on shelves. Either way, that would mean NATO on a whole is paying over $4,000 per unit if Europe is currently producing twice what the U.S. is making. That would put the NATO average around ~6700 currently. Fuck that's a lot.
When the Houthis started shooting at ships and we sent ships for protection the smart missiles they were using to shoot some of the stuff down was around 2,000,000 per missle. So AA guns were preferred use. They took a contract out with a defense company here in the states that was to convert standard launchers of smart missiles into "smart launchers" that could shoot "dumb" ammo. The lead at the facility quoted those were costing 20,000 a piece. So you could shoot 100 for the cost of 1 smart missiles. Those I'm sure were rough numbers because that was just what one of the managers of the facility mentioned to us. (I was working an IT contract supporting part of the facility at the time.). It's crazy how things take forever to get done in our republic, yet projects like that seem like they are churned up in a heartbeat. I assume it was something they had previously inquired about and didn't have a reason to pull the trigger to get financial signatures, the poof. Full go