These Pentagon guys are stuck in another era. They could have used some honest-to-goodness creative thought in promoting these things. I think they're just using the exorbitant price to scare off the Russians simply as a warfare tactic. < sarcasm off >
It would seem to a novice such as myself that oxygenation/compression on the pilots had been worked/sweated/bled out some decades ago. Why start from scratch?
These costs are not the costs to buy the planes, it is the total lifecycle cost. Things like the manpower to maintain them, the fuel, decades worth of tires, things like that.
Yes, it's a big number but lifecycle costs are always big numbers for every program. Here's the dirty secret: nobody knows how to calculate lifecycle cost (what will fuel cost in 2025 anyway?) so it's pretty much an educated guess. It's all in the assumptions made. One thing that is generally true, though: People are the biggest cost. You have to train them, pay them, feed them, etc. So if the JSF has a similar maintenance crew size as other aircraft, it likely the lifecycle cost will be on of the same magnitude, barring some crazy difference in, say, fuel costs.