i'm not convinced boeing is price-gouging here. how many customers are there for this trash can? in 2020 the pentagon bought four of them. if nobody else boug

i'm not convinced boeing is price-gouging here. how many customers are there for this trash can? in 2020 the pentagon bought four of them. if nobody else bought any, and boeing had to set up a production line just to make four of them, there's a real possibility that process actually costs something on the order of $200k once you factor in the time of all the people who had to be part of that decision-making process, testing it meets specs, procurement of materials to meet the spec of a ten-year-old production, etc. the air force has machinists and qualified people who can repair their old planes, so presumably if this was just something you could bang together out of sheet metal they would have.