https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2019/1...-tag-for-f-35/
......The Air Force’s fiscal year 2020 budget pays for the
48 F-35As in Lot 11. The current $89.2 million dollar price the Pentagon uses is calculated by separating out just the costs for the airframe and the engine from the larger total procurement cost that includes ALIS, simulators, initial spare parts, and more to get to the artificially low $89.2 million. That is far from the whole story.
The Pentagon’s own budget documents list the FY 2020 procurement cost for those 48 aircraft as more than $101 million, nearly $12 million more than the figure rolled out for press reports. Using the Navy’s charts and the same math shows that the real costs for
each F-35C is more than $123 million, while
each F-35B costs in excess of $166 million. But even that figure doesn’t tell the whole story........