Obviously, the comparison is not perfect. For starters, Have Blue was done by Kelly Johnson's Lockheed (although technically under Ben Rich, himself no slouch);

Obviously, the comparison is not perfect. For starters, Have Blue was done by Kelly Johnson's Lockheed (although technically under Ben Rich, himself no slouch); Rickover's nuclear navy was similarly led and with similar low budgets, met deadlines and exceeded expectations. So ROI for projects from that era will be much higher (and let's not mention the actual Kelly Johnson projects like the A-12...). That being said I'm not sure the F-117 was that useful in actual combat, certainly it was used because it was there but did it change anything? It flew a large number of sorties in the first Gulf War but some say these could have been flown cheaper and just as well with conventional aircraft [1], and bombed a few targets in Yugoslavia (so far away from the kind of conflict it was designed for that TV crews were filming it taking off, live) until Zoltan Dani worked out how to shoot one down using equipment worth a fraction as much thus pointing out its edge was gone in less than two decades after launch. As far as I understand it, Have Blue's main value was to pave the way for stealth research, its operational value being what happened to it in combat rather than the targets it took out. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_F-117_Nighthawk#Operational_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_F-117_Nighthawk#Opera... "On the first night they failed to hit 40% of the air-defense targets they were assigned, including the Air Defense Operations Center in Baghdad, and 8 such targets remained functional out of 10 that could be assessed. [...] many other aircraft hit targets in the downtown area, with minimal casualties when they attacked at night like the F-117"