What do we want? We want the best aircraft for our pilots and we want them to come back from each mission. We used to be able to build the best airplanes for a fairly reasonalble amount of money in a reasonably short period of time. However, our bureaucratized process for aircraft procurment has priced us out of our own market. It's sad and somewhat dangerous. It takes a large amount of hours to design, build, and test new designs before they're worthy of the (battle) field. We have aging designs that are now facing or are soon going to face superior designs. Have we come to the point where we can't afford American labor any more?
Good point. The whole idea of the F/A-18 (originally called the YF-17 IIRC when it was competing for the USAF contract with the F-16 lo, those many years ago) was that USAF needed a more modern and capable replacement for the F-5E, and that the whole idea of the F-5, F-16, and YF-17 was that a) you didn't always need an F-15, and b) it would be helpful, in a sky full of "pretty good" Soviet assets, to have rather more airframes peopled by good people of your own, than just a few excellent ones. It was the old armored-vehicle story from WW2, and our side was trying to absorb that lesson: the Germans always had far better armor (and far better-trained and more-experienced people in all branches), and yet they lost in the end to greater numbers of "okay" and "pretty good" troops and weapons systems. Which was what Lend-Lease was all about: sending thousands of trucks to Russia enabled Soviet war production to concentrate on AFV's. The Germans had the best tank-hunting vehicle of the war in the "Jagdpanther" self-propelled gun, but they were only able to build 382 of them, versus 655 British Archers, some number of heavier Tortoises, 2500+ American M-18's, and untold numbers of Soviet SU-85's and SU-100's.