“But other than that, yeah, same thing. “
I did a lot of testing for the military. I’d get upset by the press’ constant use of the $600 toilet seat example. That wasn’t a toilet seat. It was a shroud that could contain the contents of the toilet if the plane flipped over. I think it was Lockheed, if I remember, who no longer wanted to make it so they tried to sub it out. The price came back at several times the $600. And that $500 hammer? Yeah, if you had to subject a hammer design to all the testing required in our contracts it would be $500 each. That testing is expensive. Classified testing, like nuclear event, is even more expensive as they simply come back and say, “Sorry. It didn’t pass. Try again.”
Yeah. People don’t understand that for $500 dollars you not only get the hammer, but a file cabinet full of test reports that the contract required. The administrative overhead on military contracts is what costs.