Flying Hippopotamus Over Afghanistan: $500 Million-Plus

http://www.thenation.com/blog/168692/flying-hippopotamus-over-afghanistan-500-million-plus#

The Pentagon has officially outdone itself: even as the war in Afghanistan winds down to its unhappy denouement, the Department of Defense is deploying what the Wall Street Journal calls a “football-field-size airship laden with surveillance gear,” essentially a gigantic blimp that will float over the county like a giant alien spaceship from Independence Day. Which, come to think of it, is exactly how Afghans might view it.

No one has seen the damn thing yet, but it’s likely to take flight soon on a test run in New Jersey at the same airfield where the Hindenburg blimp exploded and burned.

The paper doesn’t say how much the gargantuan item costs, but its initial contract was for $517 million, and naturally it’s late, plagued by the usual delays and cost overruns.