I was just reading the February 25th edition of Time Magazine and came across an article titled, "The Most Expensive Weapon Ever Built"
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2136312,00.html. It was referring to the F-35 fighter jet, which a Marine spokesman said, "The aircraft is not operational". The article goes on to state that, "More than a decade into its development, blueprints are changing about 10 times a day, seven days a week." So what has this cost us taxpayers? $400,000,000,000! That's right, four hundred billion dollars for a plane that is being rapidly overtaken by pilotless drone technology.
This got me to thinking and I invite you to take a stab at one of your favorite civilian projects to put that into perspective. There are many infrastructure projects that would also be worthy. The point of this is perspective. According to Carlos Ghosn, the CEO of Nissan, he said that the main reason EVs are not being rapidly adopted is because the charging infrastructure is not there and needs to be built.
Somewhere I found a figure that indicated that the QC equipment costs about $20,000. It turns out that we have, 47,182 miles of interstate highway as of 2010. By doing the arithmetic it turns out that for $400 billion we could have an expensive charger every 12-1/2 feet throughout our interstate system! Of course it would make more sense to have a dozen or so chargers every 10 miles and use the rest to put lower cost, i.e. $2,000 chargers at motels, theaters, etc. We could subsidize restaurants along the Interstate to put in QC units. We could go coast-to-coast entirely on electricity. Interesting noodling.
And remember this is not the entire Defense Budget, this is just for one plane! Kind of puts things in perspective.