“system must regularly be cleaned with ... acid solution that costs $400,000 per use.”
I realise the government/military procurement process can result in higher costs than the private sector would pay, but that is beyond ridiculous.
I realise the government/military procurement process can result in higher costs than the private sector would pay, but that is beyond ridiculous.
These high costs occur when contractors have the government by the balls, because... that's what markets are for. The gov will pay $10,000 to replace a bulkhead (toilet cover), because well, toilets need to be covered on an airplane. $10,000 is just what it costs for someone to pick up the phone.
My guess is that the liquid is toxic and also might have to be processed after.
It's the same with things like outages, an outage lasting a day may "cost" $1 million, but what's actually meant is that you missed $1 million in profits for the day, not that you had to pay $1 million. If operating a carrier costs $400k/day then you could say then fixing something for a day "costs" $400k, but that's kind of a simplistic way of putting it.
Even though you're just flying a few guys (say a few acid guys, maybe an engineer who knows the toilets, just in case) out for a day or two, that's stupidly expensive. Not even just the cost of putting them on a plane or helicopter- even though you may only be paying for a few hundred man hours, you need to pay a lot to pull those guys out of whatever they were doing.
4,700 people shitting in buckets is kind of an emergency in the middle of the ocean, unfortunately. The navy is notorious for its sleep deprivation and tight schedules. Seemingly small disruptions and timewasters can lead to major problems and mistakes.
Also, it surely cannot be a good idea to keep massive amounts of acid around for non essential purposes.