Yea it’s almost like they do the government a favor and sell them below manufactured cost, that’s always been my experience with government contracting!!
I'm assuming that is sarcasm aimed at the "massively overpriced government contract parts" line I said above (sorry, it's sometimes hard to distinguish sarcasm from other types of statements on the internet sometimes)
There is a certain amount of cost in manufacturing a part. In comparison to something like a Toyota Camry, the HMMWV market is pretty small, so the cost of designing, testing, and initial setup for manufacturing all have to be factored into the end product cost.
Then add onto that all the testing required to guarantee that the parts do actually meet the government specs. On some parts that can actually be somewhat expensive.
Parts sold directly to the public don't have to meet those same government contract specifications, but the issue is those parts usually can't be sold directly to the public without still meeting the contract specs, because of the risk of those parts being sold to the government through some other channel. If the parts get caught in the government inventory without the contract specs actually being met, the manufacturer can get into trouble and risk future gov contracts.
It isn't that they couldn't sell the parts straight to the public though a back channel and without verification testing, it just isn't worth it to a lot of companies to risk their guaranteed income from gov contracts and future contracts to risk selling such a low volume product to the public.
On the other hand, China and other countries have no qualms about reverse engineering a part, then producing it at a much reduced price because they don't have the same worries about income. They'll tool up a factory, make a large amount of a part, then sell them all off and move onto the next item, never looking back. If their part has massive issues, by the time anyone finds out, all the parts have been shipped over here and it's not their problem. If the buyer here does run out of parts to sell, and the parts from that manufacturer were really bad, China also has no qualms about relabeling all the parts/equipment to come from a "different" factory or company when reality is it's all the exact same crap.
