“Yeah. And it also would be a shame if replacement parts for those Turkish F16s were somehow defective.”
Every “foreign” contract I worked on in 35 years building defense equipment, was actually through a US customer; Air
Force, Navy, etc. The same quality and test standards were used as if it was being built for the US. I asked once why this was so and the answer I got was, If things go sour with the nation we are supposed to be selling these to then the stuff goes right into US inventory. If I recall, this did happen once and we took the stuff back and modified it slightly as the stuff in US inventory had been updated to a different configuration and the foreign country was still using an older configuration.
I suspect that another reason is, the companies I worked for did not want to deal with the paperwork required to sell directly to a foreign country. I did get involved in that once and our country makes a company jump through ridiculous hoops and this paperwork can take months or even years to approve.
Any ‘black box’ we sell contains AT technology. Most purchasers understand this.