Everytime a mil contract gun comes up the little dick brigade comes out bitching and whining about price. Even though it's well documented why things cost what they do, they can't help themselves. Just to reiterate:
A. Can't sell for less to commercial market than gov/dod customer. This is FAR/DFAR basic bitch shit.
B. The contractors compliance costs alone account for a large portion of the cost. The companies don't want to spend money on this shit but dumb fucking contracting officers, HCAs and the retards who wrote the procurement authority force this on them. Think end user certificates for raw materials, additional accounting/finance documentation, inspections, plus about 100 other addendum making you do dumb shit that cost time and money.
C. Most of these contract award prices include spares, training ( flying factory armorers out to train the trainers), training materials, shipping costs, tech support and follow on support. A dude was in a firefight in Afghanistan called barret tech support with a sat phone to have someone talk them through getting the gun back up. Expectation is you become the #1 priority even if it fucks up your commercial customers. These all add to the cost.
D. Profit. Why go through all the bullshit above, spend hundreds of thousands if not millions on the solicitation and submission if you aren't going to make a decent profit.
E. The gov can cancel at anytime the contract for convience, even if you never recouped your costs.
If the gov cared about the cost they would buy a bunch of PSA ar10s in 6.5cm, pmags and containers of 140 eldms.
Same deal with any clone/contract gun be it the SCAR, M110 , 416 ect. Pay to play or stop being poor.