UK Daily Mail
The U.S. is to spend $23billion on a fleet of drone spy planes - despite facing economic turmoil and crippling debts.
Fifty-five Global Hawks are to be built over the coming years, with each aircraft costing a staggering $218 million each.
They will replace the highly-effective U-2 spy planes which were manned by pilots and played an effective role in the cold war and more recently Afghanistan.
Costly: A Global Hawk unmanned aircraft sits on a runway. The U.S. will spend $23billion on the crafts in order to replace its U-2 spy planes
But critics pointed to the escalating cost of the project at a time when the U.S. faces a major risk of defaulting on its $14.3trillion (£8.7trillion) debt.
'The Global Hawk is a very impressive product, but it is also a very expensive product,' Richard L. Aboulafia, an aviation analyst at the Teal Group, a consultancy in Fairfax, Virginia, told the New York Times.
The plan to hand defence companies billions more dollars to build the drones comes as millions of Americans face financial struggles and job cuts...[Full Article]
