The cable that the Marine Corps was overpaying by $60,000. Marine Corps The Marine Corps was paying $60,000 more than it was supposed to for a type of radio cable since 2007, according to Stars and Stripes.

The cable was discovered to be overpriced in October 2016, when Marine Cpl. Riki Clement had to fix a radio. After being told that the needed parts would take six to eight months to arrive, he decided to reverse engineer a replacement using old parts and found out its true cost was actually closer to $4,000.

Later that month, the Marine Corps said the corporal had saved the government $15 million.

The defense contractor that makes the cable, Astronics, had been charging $64,000 for each cable. Astronics did not immediately respond to request for comment.

"There may be a good reason for the price, but based on us taking apart the cable and researching the individual parts, we've found no reason for this part to cost as much as it does," Clement told Stars and Stripes in December.

The overpriced cable was one of six in the same parts catalog, Barb Hamby of Marine Corps Systems Command told Stripes.

"The catalogued mistakes were made nearly seven years ago," Tony Reinhardt, the command's team lead for automatic test systems, told Stripes. "We went through every [item] in the kit to confirm the prices and fix the errors."

Reinhardt said the cable costs $4,000 because of the material that goes into it, as well as the process of designing, developing and manufacturing it. He added that there's no record of the Marine Corps ever purchasing individual replacement cables. The originals were part of kits, and Marines had been using parts from other kits for repairs.

The cost of each kit was $21,466, Capt. Frank Allan, a project officer at Marine Corps Logistics Command, told Stripes.

This isn't the first time the military has been caught overspending. In December 2016, it was discovered that the Pentagon had buried a study from late 2015 exposing $125 billion in administrative waste. President Donald Trump has also attacked defense contractors for overpriced weapons, despite recently calling for a $54 billion boost in defense spending.