A lot of nations (including Turkey, which automatically gives the technology to Iran) invested money and pre-bought these fighters. Italy built an aircraft carrier for them. If they’re not built it will be a black eye for America and a major problem for future procurements. Who will kick in the money next time if we can’t deliver this time? But given its weight and the plainly unbelievable things they say it will be able to do, I feel it will fall short as it may have been oversold, much like the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship.
There are so many things wrong with military procurement I wouldn’t know where to start. But weapons systems are over-sold to gain the political muscle to get them built. So many new missions are added that you end up with something that is neither fish nor fowl and can’t do anything very well. Every mission in the world was added to the LCS, for example. Then there was the Army’s Future Combat Systems which was supposed to be one vehicle (or clusters of common parts) that could do everything from be an ambulance to a personnel carrier to a main battle tank. But it all had to fit on a plane and not weigh more than x tons. When you added together all the requirements they were mutually exclusive. And, to make them fit on the plane they made the sides vertical. That along with no armor meant they could not survive much of a hit. When I enquired I was told they’d solved that problem by assuming we would have total control of the battlefield and nothing would ever hit it.
Then there’s Congress, which only funds these things one year at a time so they are guaranteed lobbyist funds. What a mess.
“But weapons systems are over-sold to gain the political muscle to get them built.”
Certainly that is true. Another problem is the way the military bureaucracy issues specifications. The long design & development timelines and the ever-changing technology (especially electronics) insures that the aircraft will be out-of-date by the time it enters service. This is why the USAF/USN keeps dumping new capabilities in a design that is supposedly complete & reaching it’s Initial Operating Capability.
The whole system is a kludge, but it’s hard to perfect a system that is so complex.