I'm not going to doubt the accuracy of the numbers, but I believe this falls into the "lies, damn lies, and statistics" category. Not that those aren't real numbers, but that they certainly don't tell the whole picture. For example: $830k for a missile is less than the life insurance pay out would be if we lost five soldiers trying to take the same objective. A billion dollars for a B-2? How many are there and how long are they expected to fly? You've got to know that to calculate the return on investment. I know, for example, that the B-2 fleet is awfully small. Had we built the number the Air Force had originally asked for, the price per unit would have been a fraction of that. I'm not an expert on all things Air Force, so I'll talk about the Army which due to my job, I'm much more familiar with.
Army aviation has no plans, period, of getting a new model helicopter until at least 2025... Maybe farther out than that too. At that time, the chinook airframe will be seventy years old. The apache and the black hawk will be fifty. They upgraded, for sure, but that's a long time without a new airframe. When you consider that Army aviation as a whole has logged more than five million in air combat hours in Iraq and Afghanistan alone, what's the cost per hour of those suckers? Those same birds are still going to be flying ten and fifteen years from now. So yeah, those weapon system programs are expensive. Really expensive, in fact. But they're not taken lightly. You don't get a few new B-2s just because some general wants one. What they have is what they get.
