Present cost, at the development stage, is about $40,000 a piece, but if it enters production it should go down to about $2o,000, the military guy being interviewed said.
The interviewer (don't remember his name, but he's always impressed me as one of the lower-wattage bulbs in the NPR line-up, which is really saying something) asked a bunch of joke-y questions, but neglected to mention what seemed to me would have been the most important one: how easy would it be to shoot one of these things down? I'm neither a hunter or a military person myself, but I would think that anyone who could shoot a pheasant could bring down one of these things with an ordinary rifle -- and probably someone with even less skill. For the cost of a few bullets, one could cost the Pentagon $20,000.
What this illustrates, it seems to me, is that this is another one of myriad "defense" contracts the sole purpose of which is to dole out federal money to some manufacturer or other. Never mind if it's actually useless on the battlefield; it's really intended as pork.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ After the Buddha died, people still kept pointing to his shadow in a cave for centuries—an enormous, dreadful shadow. God is dead: but the way people are, there may be, for millennia, caves in which his shadow is still pointed to. — And we — we must still overcome his shadow! —Friedrich Nietzsche