The "overpriced toilet seat and hammer" story is old and asinine. The reason was that at that time, the price of a contract was divided evenly between the various pieces involved. So if the contract involved a $25 million tank and a couple hammers (or whatever) the total price was divided by the number of items and this average price was assigned to each for accounting purposes. Really, the figure was meaningless, since the items were never intended to be priced individually, but rather as a whole. Then some ignorant dickwad of a reporter found out about the story and ran with it, and rather than talking about the $1000 tank that the Army got, they talked about the $1000 hammer in the same contract. Or they got a hell of a deal on the building, because they "overpaid" for the toilets in it.
It would be like if you bought a rebuilt engine and divided the price evenly by all the components in the engine. It would mean you got a hell of a deal on those sweet A-beam rods, but paid out the ass for the valve cover gaskets and that crank o-ring. Since you didn't buy the components individually, the values assigned to them are meaningless.
That all being said, the prices of the trucks are pretty reasonable given the prices of civilian equivalents at the same time. Inflation measures a "fixed market basket of goods," and things like trucks don't necessarily follow along the same path of price increases. Manufacturing improvements, materials improvements, etc., always allow more content to be packed in for less money year after year.
