Jassik said: »
I'm thinking more along the lines of things that aircraft that are bought from us. I'm not honestly sure if they pay the same price for them that we do, I kind of doubt it
They usually pay less then the US does because their governments aren't on the hook to fund the R&D. The way big ticket defense spending goes is the companies all demonstrate a proof-of-concept with an estimated cost during the bidding, the DoD then chooses the one they feel fits the needs the most. The company then starts the development project to produce the item and because the R&D is so expensive it gets built into the final unit price tag. The more the US orders the more units the R&D gets to be spread across and thus the lower the final price per unit is. When the DoD cuts spending and reduces the final order, the price goes up to compensate which creates that death spiral we see the F35 program in (there are other issues too). Foreign Sales Orders (FSO) on the other hand are negotiated separately and won't take the R&D into account because those countries didn't buy into the program up front. Once the US DoD has sunk $100bn into a program, it's very hard to walk away and refuse to buy anything, while England, Germany or Italy haven't spent a dime and can just decide to order a product from a different contractor.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg, personal costs are a HUGE part of defense spending. The costs to recruit, train and manage service members is gigantic, further more the health costs related to them is also a big budget eater. Then lets add on refit, repair and replace costs, which are used to cover both training and battle field loss's. Every item that's damaged, destroyed or obsoleted needs to be replaced, repaired or upgraded and that costs a pretty penny. Now lets move on to services, that military communications and intelligence network that needs to be maintained and is outrageously expensive because of the levels of redundancy involved. Try to imagine the costs of building a second world wide internet that's access to extremely controlled and not connected to the normal public internet. Now add on all the cross domain and middle-ware solutions to allow us to collaborate with our allies using a shared, and therefor not the actual, coalition network.
Yeah Defense spending is really complicated and the USA is footing way more of the bill then it should. This is a result of Cold War era policies where we agree to cover this expensive in exchange for our allies not joining the Progressive Communist movement, much to the anger of the leftists at the time.
