Cool new military stuff

The Polecat, built by Lockheed Martin, was just unveiled. It's a high altitude drone of some sort, but the most eye-catching line was

The company built the plane with $27 million of its own money over an 18-month period.

A pretty impressive design, for only $27 million, in only 18 months. It's startling how much the client matters in terms time and cost. Even if you throw out the corruption and overruns (which would be huge), an internal client is much more likely to select only the low-hanging fruit, and put that into the mix.