Rate of Return

From Robert Kaplan in September's Atlantic Monthly:

If the B-2 is necessary, for both our force structure and our negotiating credibility, as Colonel Wheeler believes it is, then its cost of more than $1 billion per plane is a truly depressing indicator of the price of empire. “Look at the rate of return al-Qaeda got on 9/11,” one former civilian defense official told me. “For an investment of just a few hundred thousand dollars, they forced us to spend billions.” In other words, as necessary as the B-2 might be, what’s its rate of return—20 percent, perhaps? “I’m not saying that we require a rate of return like al-Qaeda gets,” this former official went on, “but we’ll need to narrow the difference if we’re going to remain a great power.”

Image: Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire, Destruction, 1836