Bob Martin wrote:

Tim Douglass wrote:

Most of this goes back to the contracts under which things are
purchased. A *lot* of military stuff is purchased at very low prices
because of the high volume.

This certainly isn't true in Britain.
The military is charged obscene prices by the manufacturers.

If it's like the US it depends on the item and the volume and the
manufacturer.

For one-offs the prices can be very high due to administrative overhead--we
had one guy whose full time job it was to keep up with the changes in the
specification for an assembly that one of our techs could make from scratch
in a couple of days.

Then there are the small-business set-asides, where a certain amount of
contracting has to go to small or minority-owned businesses--some of those
businesses are very, very good, but many barely meet the requirements to
bid--nonetheless they get the preference on some items because there's a
more critical item that they need to procure from a more capable
contractor. So they have a lot of costs involved in meeting the spec and
keeping up the paperwork that a more established contractor doing larger
volume would not.

But if it's something like 100,000 A/N bolts then the price is generally
pretty low.

When you hear about things like $600 toilet seats there's generally more to
the story.

--
--John
Reply to jclarke at ae tee tee global dot net
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)