"Necessity is the mother of invention."
And we Americans are her children.
Err, in this case, South African genius.
Unfortunately, (but understandably) Congress balks at buying ANY military equipment abroad, since there's no pork involved for their home district.
But there's a lot of speciality equipment that other countries have come up with that works fine. And I don't have any problem with buying it, instead of spending three times the money reinventing the wheel making our own version when one already exists.
We have a great Defense industry and I'm sure 95% of all our military purchases will be domestic, but anything less than the best equipment can get troops killed. There's some other stuff (like lightweight French artillery that works fine, suitable for being flown in to places with C-130s) that we don't make, yet we're not buying it because of politics, which strikes me as dumb.