system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why is military equipment so expensive?

Like on how can a jet cost $62 million and a tomahawk missile cost $1.5 million?
gpt
An elephant is a mouse built to a government specification.

Most military gear is designed to work in extremely hostile environments, hot, cold, wet, vibration... the list is long. One has to prove that it does so, which means a lot of testing. Accordingly, design costs are astronomical.

Production, on the other hand, is often severely limited. If you can spread your design costs over millions of units, as happens in the consumer world, the per-unit amortised design cost is low. But when production is only a few tens of items, as in a fighter jet, the design cost per unit is high.

Then there is tradition. Once opon a time, electronic devices were unreliable and cranky, two qualities the military can do without. Accordingly, elaborate procedures were put in place to make every component traceable to its source, in the hope that process problems could be found and corrected. These procedures are costly.

Modern electronics is highly reliable, even under field conditions. Think what your cellphone endures. MIlitary purchasing has not caught up with this fact, it is still in the 1950s.