Something you guys haven't discussed is there's an old PR move in .mil aviation to propose a ridiculous theoretical possible cost per hour of operation compared

Something you guys haven't discussed is there's an old PR move in .mil aviation to propose a ridiculous theoretical possible cost per hour of operation compared to actual results from deployed weapon systems. Then when its deployed the cost of of the new weapon system goes to the traditional "twenty grand per hour" or so, unsurprisingly. The problem is you can make things a little faster or slower but fundamentally the labor cost of an air wing is about the same and the support of the support troops is literally a constant. Replacing a wing of A-10 with this thing isn't magically going to make the gate guard work for less money or remove the need for a diversity officer from HQ. Inspecting a really expensive XYZ costs the same labor as inspecting a cheap XYZ. Ditto replacing landing lights or tires or whatever other consumables. So take the total budget of an air wing, divide it by total hours flown (some a/c are more or less reliable than others) and you get about twenty grand per flying hour. Another tradition is you pick something thats a labor nightmare. Lets say Osprey super high pressure hydraulics. Now you can fix that in a new A/C using somewhat better hydraulics design. But its like a murphys law that you'll just mess up the ... engine controller or some ridiculous thing. Another way to put it is since pre-roman era times, the troops are always complaining about something, although what they complain about varies a bit over the centuries. So its never all that much cheaper to maintain and operate one similar plane over another.