I mostly posited it as a joke for winking at the fictitious studies, but yah the comparative cost to alternatives may be not too shabby after all. "Compared to what" is often a question left as an afterthought. I try to think of alternatives right off the bat. But once you start diluting a story against reasonable alternatives and see where a decision landed in the valley of options the story loses some of its outrage edge.

If this article was written by almost any other news org I would say "compared to what" would be some attempt to privatize the entertainment so someone could make a profit, luckily the article seems genuinely interested in the harm the machines are creating for the military.