Brandon Weichert

The F-22 Raptor was built so that American pilots could kill enemy fighters before those pilots ever saw them, at nearly $143,000,000 per aircraft. In 2009 at Nellis Air Force Base, a US Navy EA-18G Growler — a fourth-generation electronic attack jet costing about $68,000,000 — scored a simulated AIM-120 kill on one. The Growler pilot painted an F-22 silhouette on the side of his cockpit.

In September 2013 the American attack submarine USS Dallas got inside the protective screen around the Royal Navy carrier HMS Illustrious in the Gulf of Oman. The carrier had the frigate HMS Westminster, the destroyer USS Bulkeley and two support ships around her. She had Merlin helicopters with dipping sonar, a Seahawk and a Lynx hunting for the submarine. And she knew it was coming, because that was the exercise.

The F-22 Raptor was built to kill an enemy fighter before that fighter knew it was there, at roughly $143,000,000 an aircraft. At the Advanced Tactical Leadership Course at Al Dhafra Air Base in November 2009, the exercise deliberately removed that advantage and forced the Raptor into close-range engagements. Cockpit footage released years later shows a French Rafale — a fourth-generation fighter costing around 64,000,000 euros — moving into a firing position behind one and taking a simulated shot.

Across its whole service life the SR-71 Blackbird accumulated 53,490 flight hours, 11,675 of them above Mach 3, over 17,300 sorties. By the late 1980s the surviving fleet of 12 aircraft cost roughly $260,000,000 a year to operate — about $20,000,000 per aircraft — and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney put the figure at around $85,000 per flight hour. The Air Force argued the same money could sustain two tactical fighter wings.

Lockheed built 64 F-117 Nighthawks — 5 development aircraft and 59 production F-117As — in a classified program costing about $6,560,000,000. The Air Force flew them for 25 years and retired the fleet in 2008, calculating that it would save roughly $1,070,000,000 between 2007 and 2011. It then kept the aircraft. F-117s returned to the air in September 2021, flew in Sentry Savannah in 2022, and the Air Force says they will keep flying until 2034.

The B-21's average procurement unit cost target was set at about $550,000,000 in 2010 dollars — roughly $750,000,000 today. The program is projected at around $86,000,000,000 in research, development and procurement through 2031, with the FY2026 request alone near $10,000,000,000. Northrop Grumman has absorbed losses to hold the line on that unit price.

The Ministry of Defence awarded RBSL £800 million in May 2021 for 148 Challenger 3 vehicles, near £2 billion across the whole of life. A separate £25 million went to Pearson Engineering in Newcastle for turret structures, creating 285 jobs. Another £40 million went into the Telford factory. Initial Operating Capability was set for 2027.

The Navy historically allowed six months for a Planned Incremental Availability. The Carl Vinson's latest ran seven, from November 2025 to June 12, 2026. A Docking Planned Incremental Availability can run to fifteen months, which is what the USS Nimitz absorbed after one of its own long deployments. What is the fate of the USS Abraham Lincoln?

Ninety miles in half a minute. The X-43D would have been an unmanned, hydrogen-fueled scramjet demonstrator built by NASA and Boeing, with active cooling on its inlet and leading edges because nothing conventional survives that heat. Three flights were planned, one per year. Nothing was ever cut, welded, or assembled.

More than 3,000 workers in Norfolk built the battleship USS Alabama around the clock and finished in 30 months — nine months ahead of schedule. She was decommissioned after four and a half years.