Ugens Economist har en udmærket artikel om langtidsudviklingen i prisen på forsvarsmateriel og hvilke trends der kan læses herudfra i forbindelse med finanskrisens stigende pres også på forsvarsbudgetterne på begge sider af Atlanten. Artiklen indeholder også fine observationer omkring nogle af de særlige forhold der gør sig gældende indenfor forsvarsindustrien.
Much of the performance of modern weapons lies in their computing power and software. So why do weapons not follow Moore’s Law, which predicts the rapid fall in the cost of computing power? For one thing, military equipment lacks the huge scale of consumer electronics, which drives down unit costs. Military software is often bespoke. The need to keep it secure makes it hard to upgrade and to develop the “plug and play” functionality of PCs. Instead of choosing products in the open market, big countries
develop weapons from scratch. And instead of negotiating fixed-price contracts, governments typically bear the risk of designing advanced systems in “cost-plus” arrangements. Even aerospace giants such as Boeing and Europe’s EADS, which compete to produce expensive civil airliners, are wary of developing a military jet on their own.(…)
One response to high manpower costs is to rely on technology. But that does not come cheap. Study after study shows that the price of combat aircraft has been rising substantially faster than inflation, often faster than GDP. The same is true of warships. In a book published in 1983, Norman Augustine, a luminary of the aerospace industry, drafted a series of lighthearted “laws”. In one aphorism, he plotted the exponential growth of unit cost for fighter aircraft since 1910 (see chart 2), and extrapolated it to its absurd conclusion: “In the year 2054, the entire defence budget will purchase just one aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy 3½ days each per week except for leap year, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day.”
