geoduck14 parent
To quote a military friend of mine:
"Why build 1 plane when you can build 3 planes for the cost of... does math... 3x!"
"First rule of government spending... why build one, when you can have two, for twice the price!" -Contact, 1997
That was never the intention of course. But I guess there are still benefits of scale like maintenance parts, training etc.
My fear would be that with current US acquisition, it would have been 3x 50 billion instead.