
Given that so much of warfare is logistics, I’d think having a plane that costs half as much to buy and one third as much per hour of flight factors pretty heavily - including on that cost of training pilots. And I cannot imagine U.S. maintenance supply would come close to cost competitiveness vs having domestic manufacturing support that also spends defense money into our own economy.
Sure that probably wouldn’t have tipped the balance a couple years ago - I mean, it didn’t.
But here we are. At least we aren’t already 40 planes into production.
It’s not too late for us all to do better. 😉