"Defense contractor's have exorbitant overhead, which just keeps growing, and that is spread over very low sales volume."
The overhead is because the public would be unwilling to accept product failures for their precious soldiers, but are willing to accept the failures for the products they pay for, because they can always take them back to the store. Kind of hard to do that sort of thing on the battlefield. This is all imposed by government contracts, so if you're complaining about the cost of military hardware, complain to the person in the mirror and your "representatives." As an example, consider the (in)famous MIL-STD-883B qualified integrated circuits, which are made on the exact same production line as the parts you'd find in your laptops. The difference in cost comes from the extensive testing, life testing, documentation, special handling, and yield loss from all the testing. When you drop your M14 equivalent in the mud, you stop, sit down, and clean it before trying to use it. The soldier using the M14 in the field often didn't have that option, and while US arms are known to be somewhat delicate, the Автомат Калашникова can be literally be manufactured in a barn and can work in pretty much any harsh conditions.
Much of this can be traced back to the False Claims Act of the Civil War, as well as the discovery during WWII that US fasteners weren't interchangeable with the British ones. Once the need for standardization became evident, it also became evident that the typical product and component is woefully under-specified. Contract law allows consumers to buy a product in a store based on a few sentences of description, and the understanding that such products are intended for, and designed for, a certain environment. However, the military has a much wider range of environments, including both temperatures, pressures, water immersion, vibration, etc. What is described in a few sentences on a placard in a store, or on the face of the product packaging, can be turned into 40 pages of single spaced specifications. These specifications protect both the consumer (the soldier) and the contractor, since the specifications are supposed to encompass almost all the conditions in which a soldier might use the product, and if the contractor has tested for compliance to the specifications, they are protected from the False Claims Act. The additional kicker is that the volumes that the military consume, while large in the military sense, are puny in the consumer sense. Trying to buy a part to a military specification from Samsung, or the like, and the first question they'll ask is, "how many are you going to order?" Your answer would be, "Well, we're only looking to buy about 100 now, but in 5 years, we might want 5000" They politely chuckle and point out that they sell millions of these things each month, and your business simply isn't profitable to them. This often forces custom designs, which are built to small production volumes, and which are then (over)extensively tested, all of which increases costs.
TTFN
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