Oldsailor65 wrote:
This newly released footage is a great reminder of how the free market and the government work in tandem to keep Americans safe abroad, and it is truly impressive.
Free market...are you kidding? The day military defense contractors have anything to do with free markets is a day that will never happen
...the pentagon gives their chosen contractor ludicrous amounts of money to develop something that should be developed 100% on interested contractor's dimes.
...bid, there is no such thing as a bid that has anything to do with being a bid in any way shape or form. Once into a project they go back for hundreds of millions or even billions in cost overruns.
...Fixing fatal design flaws can cost more per unit than the original "bids" were
...After spending ludicrous amounts f money developing prototypes comes the misnamed bid price per unit. Of course the cost of development which was already paid for by the government gets wrapped back up in a cost per unit "bid", because of course they need to pay for development costs as part of the price of something.
...So then, after the military gets jets or wh**ever that were supposed to cost $50 million a unit at a cost of several times the projected or bid price, successful weapons systems go on to be sold to other countries at the more reasonable costs they should have cost the military, the government having absorbed all their development costs
I was involved in a close enough proximity to weapons systems being created by a dozen leading defense contractors in the Silicon Valley to see what they were, their costs, and the political games played to get billions more out of the government.
No defense contract has ever or ever will be anything resembling free market exceptionalism, except that their exceptionally overpriced end costs are exceptional examples of greed, graft, and fraud