An Xbox controller might cost a consumer 30 dollars at Target, but the "Xbox controllers" the government is going to settle for will cost much more than 30 dollars a pop, and even if they are "cheap" to begin with they won't be cheap at all by the time they change them for something else.

People don't understand why things can be so expensive in the government. Much of it is testing, that new Xbox controller will be tested, tested again, and then certified, and tested again. If changes are made, regression testing, and then further unit testing and then the cost of certification all over again.

And this all costs so much, a lot of stuff never changes once it gets certified, so then you have climbing costs of maintaining equipment that the original company that made it has gone out of business decades ago.

Oh, there will be tons of documentation written, the government documents every little thing, training is also very expensive.

All of this goes into the total cost of 38,000 dollars per joystick; you simply can't ignore the cost of actually testing, certifying, documenting and training the device and we still haven't gotten into the costs of deploying it to the fleet.

At the end of the day, the Navy has only really swapped a 38,000 joystick made a long time ago, with what will be a 38,000 dollar joystick that's more modern.