Ok but if 200 planes need to be upgraded so that they don't get shot down by ____ new weapon. It's not possible to build an ASIC for this, so you're probably looking at doing something on an FPGA. You need a few FPGA hardware engineers, electrical engineers, software engineers. Even if the project only takes a year to design, build, and test. And then you spend an extra 6 months because xilinx's fpga tools basically don't work. You've got minimum $1 million dollars in salary, and that's not including the facility, materials, and testing costs. Even if the program costs $20 million, if it saves 40 planes, you can't tell a dead airmen's family that their loved ones life wasn't worth $500,000.