If you cannot understand the words costs to damn much, you have a problem. Drones are the future, get use to it.
Current cost estimate is what 225,000,000: per copy and 65,000 per hour. For 10 seconds over target. Just damn. And the damn thing cannot get with in a hundred miles of the new Russian anti aircraft missiles. They do have phase radar, so end of stealth game.
For me, it isn’t just the cost. Heck, let’s even put the cost completely aside. The B-2 cost a boatload of money, and I think it was worth the cost relative to the capabilities we have in return.
We’ve been down this *exact* road with an aircraft project in the US before, even with the NATO partners as joint customers.
Anyone remember the cost and problems in the F-111 program? What a C-F that project was.
From the get-go, we (the taxpayers and the services) were told that the JSF program’s aim was to develop a low-cost, multi-mission platform for all three services (USAF, USN, USMC) flying fixed-wing aircraft. The problem for all engineering projects with this large a constituency is “mission creep,” which begets “feature creep,” which means that schedules keep getting pushed out, features are added in at a very late point in the design cycle, etc.
For engineers, these kinds of projects are the ones that task your very soul at times. I count myself lucky that when I worked in the defense sector, I never had to deal with this kind of crap.