This is a reducto ad absurdum example of how the US government is paying out the nose to keep a bunch of manufacturing and development work on-shore in the USA. Yeah, sure, it's a trash can, there's no reason it should cost $50k. We're all agreed that's an absurd amount to pay for a trash container. The government isn't just paying for the trash can. They're paying for people to design, tool, and maintain that design…
>The government isn't just paying for the trash can. >They're paying for people to design, tool, and maintain that design. It's economic investment in people and skills, not necessarily just the finished product. I call bullshit on that. There is no "maintenance" on that design, it was already done and paid for. It's a trashcan, it doesn't require specialized tooling to the cost of $50k. That's far above "make the to…
To understand this you have to appreciate a few things. First, these are military-grade trashcans. That sounds ridiculous, but there are a whole range of MILSPEC standards that must be followed to deliver anything to the military. Certain materials cannot be used, certain vendors can't be.
Second, there's always design maintenance. C'mon, this is a site of programmers. People here understand the reason you'd maintain software: redoing your old, working C code in Rust; upgrading applications designed for XP to run on Windows 10, etc. TFA quotes the E-3 Sentry, a design based on the 707 from late 1960's. The trashcan design needs to be updated! Certainly material sizes and quality are substantially different, rivet part numbers have changed, coatings have changed. Dealing with changes means substantial time qualifying the new parts.
Third is the issue of scale. If you're making a million cell phones you can sell them at the low price of $1k each; but if you make just one it might cost $1B. Here, we're talking trashcans. If you build a thousand, you hire an engineer to oversee the design requirements and master machinist, and then a small army of machinists and assemblers to make the parts, and a quality guy to inspect them, and some other guy to do the documentation. How many of those guys do you need if you make just one or two? Well, not as many, just the most expensive ones.
Hand waving here: we're going to make 10 trashcans. I'll bid 40 hours of engineering time, 80 hours of machinist, and 40 hours of quality/paperwork guy time. Assuming realistic numbers for those guys, you're talking about maybe $30k (don't forget to include overhead costs, which are more than you think they are). I'd guess a couple $k of parts, but just realized I forgot machine time, paint shop time, incoming material quality inspection, etc., etc. Amazingly, though, if you only bought one trashcan, the price doesn't change all that much. Most of that machinist time is setting up.
So, gosh, I mean, there's a lot here. And Boeing is more expensive than I am, and has more processes and procedures. And they know how to make these trashcans in a way that fits the aircraft.
These aren't COTS parts, and they'll never be, because in general, COTS parts have short lifetimes. The B-52, for example, has been flying since forever and it's still being upgraded. There aren't a lot of mainstream items with service lives like that. You know where the military gets great prices? Where there's a substantial dual-use application: guns, bullets, computers, office desks, building HVAC units, etc. They can buy from the mass market. As long as they don't want excessive service lives out of them, they'll pay the same price as you. It's when they want something special that costs extra, same as you or me.