The Price of Hellfire Missiles: Everything Americans Could Buy at the Cost of a Drone Strike

The Costs of Freedom:
What else can we buy at the price of a Hellfire Missile?

Recently, there has been a lot of whining & complaining in the US about things like a lack of affordable healthcare & budget cuts to programs that feed hungry people. What these cry-babies need to understand is that drone campaigns are not cheap. Seriously — how do these people expect the US government to keep blowing up weddings in Yemen and make sure the basic needs of its people are met at the same time?

Hellfire Missile
Price Tag — $110,000

In addition to being named in a way that leaves zero doubt that we are the good guys in this movie, the Hellfire missile has multi-mission, multi-target “precision-strike” abilities & can kill human beings from land, air, & sea. Basic models of these laser-guided firecrackers use shaped-charge HEAT ( high-explosive anti-tank ) warheads but upgraded models include blast fragmentation sleeves for bulk-murder & thermobaric warheads that suck the air out of Afghan caves & can even collapse buildings. Jointly made by Lockheed-Martin & Boeing, the Hellfire series has become the bread-&-butter missile for the modern helicopter- & drone-based killing industries.

Things Americans Could Afford
Per Hellfire Missile & Drone Strike:

The price of a Hellfire missile like the kind released by the MQ-9 Reaper in a US drone strike is roughly equal to the yearly taxes paid by 74 wage-earning workers, with enough left over to buy a candy bar:

$110,000 ÷ $1,486 = 74.02

Reaper drones carry 4 Hellfire missiles, however, and the average number of weapons released in an airstrike last year was 2.2, which means the price-tag for 1 drone strike’s worth of Hellfire missiles is closer to $242,000. To understand what a drone strike is, try to imagine the missiles as metal bags stuffed with the taxes of 163 workers being launched at a mosque in Pakistan. You can also think of them as 10 college degrees printed on a few over-sized diplomas collapsing a building in Iraq or as an exploding version of the yearly compensation received by 9 workers near the median income in the US.

Things Americans Could Afford
Per Defense Budget for Hellfire Missiles:

The $190.2 million or so spent by the Pentagon to purchase 1,729 Hellfire missiles in 2015 is equal to the cost of providing 1 year of housing for 19,807 homeless people, including utility subsidies & the salaries to pay 1 case manager for every 30 recipients:

1,729 Hellfire Missiles ÷ Yearly Cost of Housing for the Homeless
$190,190,000 ÷ 9,602 = 19,807.33 or 9,807 People Housed for 1 Year

And we would still have $3,186 left to buy a LG 75″ LED 4K Ultra HD Smart TV as a housewarming gift to 1 formerly-homeless person, chosen by lottery. It would take a total of $248,558,282 to buy one for all of them, so — if we only have the defense budget for fiscal year 2015 — the rest would need to buy their own. But if we use fiscal year 2016 instead, there would be funds to buy 5,950 Hellfire missiles — and that, my friends, is a game-changer. With $654.5 million, we could buy housing for 19,807 people, subsidized utilities, & a 75″ smart TV in each unit — with nearly $406 million to spare! $216M out of that can replace the 10,000 lead pipes in Flint, Michigan and the last $190 million would cover 1 month of groceries for every human being in San Francisco, plus another 20,000 or so in the suburbs.

5,950 Hellfire Missiles – Housing & Smart TVs for 19,807 People
$654,500,000 – $248,558,282 = $405,941,718
$405,941,718 – Replacing 10,000 Lead Pipes in Flint
$405,941,718 – $216,000,000 = $189,941,718
$189,941,718 ÷ Average Monthly Grocery Expenses
$189,941,718 ÷ $214.75 = 884,478.3 ( Population of San Francisco: 864,816 )

But the cost of Reaper drones, Hellfire missiles, & the human beings we erase when we use them are only tiny fractions of the price millions of people in the Middle East pay with their blood & that the US demands of its people for what it keeps insisting is their freedom— whatever the hell that means.

In solidarity,
John Laurits

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