[Yo-Yo]

When I was in the Air Force, small electronic parts such as a diode, which cost $0.59 for a blister pack of 5 at Radio Shack, came individually wrapped in an airtight two layer package (inside mylar, outside brown paper) with the National Stock Number, lot number, date code, and contractor's name stamped on the outside. I'm sure those diodes cost at least $5.00 each.

If the military wants COTS pricing, they have to buy in COTS packaging as well.

[17th Miss Regt]

As well, the government often requires expensive acceptance testing for materials and they may require lots of paperwork along with the product. This stuff adds up quickly.

When they specify that a widget is supposed to be bought from a minority or woman owned business that may tack on quite a premium to the price as well. These are the rules set by Congress and the executive branch...

[antidisestablishment]

And COTS engineering. Government RFPs are filled with requirements that have equivalent COTs products, but with minor differences that equate to enormous engineering and tooling costs. If you have to recoup all those costs on a one-off or small-run product, then it is not going to be cheap.

Businesses that have to make a profit would never build in such costs. If FWA (fraud, waste and abuse) was an alphabet agency, their budget would dwarf most other agencies.

[DariusBane]

The one thing the article does not address is the additional cost of doing business with the government as compared to doing business with anybody else. The documentation is staggering. The packaging can be illogical. Boilerplate procurement requests with extraneous and unrelated requirements attached.

Anyone else wanting a shovel, or a hundred shovels goes out and buys good shovels at a decent price. The government puts out 150 pages of specs and buys a shovel for 10 times the price. And buys a shovel that nobody has ever built before.

[Hootowl99]

There's a pretty good chance that your $5.00 diode cost to the military vs. the $0.59 Radio Shack is not a good example. I got ahold of an electrical component catalog a while back and these types of items have an extraordinary wide range in wholesale cost.

The devil is in the details or more accurately the specifications. In this case it is in accuracy, precision, temperature and vibration ranges, shielding and such. For example with resistors, a bulk price would be a few pennies for a low end item with say 5% precision compared to several dollars for a milspec with 0.005% precision.

[Hootowl99]

There's a pretty good chance that your $5.00 diode cost to the military vs. the $0.59 Radio Shack is not a good example. I got ahold of an electrical component catalog a while back and these types of items have an extraordinary wide range in wholesale cost.

The devil is in the details or more accurately the specifications. In this case it is in accuracy, precision, temperature and vibration ranges, shielding and such. For example with resistors, a bulk price would be a few pennies for a low end item with say 5% precision compared to several dollars for a milspec with 0.005% precision.

[reed13k]

and take COTs level testing and development.