I was reading that the USA is blocking Turkey from acquiring F-35s. Turkey is reportedly anxious, and throwing some hollow threats.
I have two questions regarding this:
Why are countries like Turkey (even UK and Germany) dependent on the USA for F-35s? Why can't they build their own F-35-like airplanes?
Is that they can't afford the development cost, or is it that they don't have technical expertise to do so?
It takes a long time and a lot of money, infrastructure and expertise to build military aircraft.
Take the Eurofighter Typhoon as an example:
In 1988, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Armed Forces told the UK House of Commons that the European Fighter Aircraft would "be a major project, costing the United Kingdom about £7 billion".
It was soon apparent a more realistic estimate was £13 billion... By 1997 the estimated cost was £17 billion; by 2003, £20 billion, and the in-service date (2003, defined as the date of delivery of the first aircraft to the RAF) was 54 months late.
This was a collaborative effort between the UK, France, Germany and others, some of the world's largest economies, and they didn't get it right!
So when one country that is not an economic powerhouse, such as Turkey, has their defence needs declined by a supplier country that is technically competent and resource rich, then that makes them anxious. Their needs are imminent, but aircraft production takes decades and billions.
Building supersonic stealth fighter jets is very, very hard. It requires cutting edge engineers in many different disciplines, processes to manufacture materials used nowhere else for stealth purposes, advanced computers and software, and much, much more.
To make something like that you need not just a company to make the final plane itself, which is just the tip of the iceberg, but companies to extract the raw materials, to refine those materials, and to make parts and components of the final product.
Consider this: a major TV movie has credits that list thousands of people. Building a real jet fighter takes something on the order of a thousand to ten thousand times as many people to make as a major TV movie.
There are only about six companies in the entire world that are capable of making supersonic fighter jets (two in the U.S., one in Western Europe, one in Japan, one in Russia and one in China).
Stealth technology is very cutting edge and rare, and access to that technology is highly controlled. The U.S. developed it the first time in the 1980s, and the Chinese and Russians are just bringing into service now stealth aircraft reverse engineered from information available about the U.S. version.
There is also a huge upfront cost. The F-35 has a per unit cost, all in, of about $150 million a unit, assuming that about 800+ will be built, for a total cost on the order of $1,200 billion. But, at least half of that cost goes to designing, prototyping and testing the first few units. If you build just one, it costs $600 billion. The economies of scale are extreme, so if you can't afford to buy several hundred of them, it is prohibitively expensive to design your own.
So, it is mix of lack of manufacturing infrastructure, lack of technical expertise, and economies of scale.
Building a real jet fighter takes something on the order of a thousand to ten thousand times as many people to make as a major TV movie. [Citation needed] Under your stated set of rules, you'd also need to take into account the supply chain for all the equipment for the movie. Certainly, for the film itself (or the drives it's stored in, if digital). Also, the cameras. And the editing software involved, that might be reasonable to include. And where do we stop? Do we count the supply chain of the truck that hits the main character in scene 3?
Most countries would want to give all their defense contracts to domestic suppliers, both to spend the money in the domestic industry and to retain strategic independence. (There are a few cases where buying foreign gear could be seen as a deliberate bribe of the supplier, I'll exclude those.)
As ohwilleke pointed out, major defense projects have a huge initial R&D cost before the first aircraft gets off the ground and small or even medium countries are unable to afford that on their own. So the options if they want a modern jet fighter are:
The US mostly uses the first option, but they have been known to use the second or third option.
The various EU states mix the first, second, and third option. They found that both both separate national programs and multinational programs with diverse specifications are highly inefficient, yet the national ministries of defense loathe to abandon purchasing decisions. They promise to do better in the future, but we'll see.
This also has a relation to the United States' reputation for how it fights its wars, namely, by fighting dirty. The US military has a huge R&D budget so that when a war breaks out, they have the best toys to overwhelm the enemy forces, they can mass produce them, and they aren't going to get left behind because there isn't a war. The list of things that you own today because of US military R&D is crazy huge as well.
Now, the question morphs to a logical follow up: Why does the U.S. give other nations their latest and greatest toys to play with? Three Reasons: First, the United States has a long history of avoiding war hurting the country by keeping war "Over There" as it were. This policy is known as the Monroe Doctrine, and was named after our 5th president, James Monroe, who used it as foreign policy. Americans were largely apathetic to war in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East unless they take some action against us first. In modern use of Monroe Doctrine, we would rather an ally fight battles that don't directly pertain to us than to come in and help, so we're more than happy that they can have our guns if it means it stays out of the Americas.
Secondly, nobody robs the gun store. What I mean by this is that as the supplier of arms to a host of nations around the world, the United States is less likely to have someone declare war on us because they are fighting with our own complex weapons that we made for them. We have more of them, we can replace the ones they broke, and even if you're crazy enough to still try it, you're not the only customer in the store. Not to mention, we don't give you the best toys always. The F-22 is a superior plane by every measure to the F-35 but it relies on classified technology that we don't want the rest of the world knowing about and to such a degree that if it were stripped, it would be a brick. So we could not sell it to allies, so the F-35 is functionally a sellable version of the F-22.
Finally, there is an easy intelligence angle. The companies that make these weapons have to clear the orders from anyone other than the U.S. Government with the U.S. Government. If getting countries to willingly hand you intelligence on their entire airforce and making money off of that deal to boot isn't dirty fighting, I don't know what is. Not to mention, we can impose limits. Say Turkey wants 30 F-35... we can say we won't sell them one plane over 20.
There are two factors in why another country wants to buy weapons from another country.
One, the cost side, is already very well explained by the other answers.
But there is also an diplomatic part to this. Buying weapons from a friendly state brings dependency and an economical boost for the selling state, as well as a sign of trust towards the buyer. If you look for example at the German military post-WW2, they bought a lot of weapons from other now-allied states to show that they are now with them, such as the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter.
On the other side, if you distrust someone, you won't help them arm themselves - especially if your weapons are some of the best that are available - and this is mostly why the Turkish government is so angry about not getting the F-35. It shows that they are losing the support of the US.
Cost effective production of high tech aircraft requires selling them to other countries. Without export, the costs quickly become (more?) prohibitive. There are some countries who could eat the costs - without exports - if they wanted to, Turkey is not among them (China, USA, India a couple decades from now, the EU if it counts as a "country", and formerly the USSR).
Turkey as a brand for military high tech aircraft does not exist, so they would need to build the brand and expertise from scratch, which is a very expensive, very high risk, and very slow process. Politically, it can go wrong while the politicians who started it still hold office, but it cannot possibly succeed while the politicians who started it still hold office (even Erdogan will be retired 25 years from now).
