Exactly. Most narratives hang everything on simplifications like “willing to spend what it takes to win.” Reality is more complex and there are serious drawback

Exactly. Most narratives hang everything on simplifications like “willing to spend what it takes to win.” Reality is more complex and there are serious drawbacks to any real life examples. A better comparison mould have been circa 2000 "asian tiger" policies of south korea, taiwan, etc. The idea was to subsidize industries with massive growth potential... on a 20-50 year horizon. On that sort of a timeline, F-35 program might be considered an ok success. More expensive than necessary, but better than not having invested. For this to make sense, fighter jets need to be a massive growth industry, and adjacent to other massive growth industries. Not sure if the US has appetite for generational investments in industries. A lot goes into success and failure at something like this than the "correct theory" though. Part of the idea behind letting the semiconductor industry decline is that it frees up capital and human resources to work on higher ROI stuff. It's hard to get a high ROI manufacturing, because manufacturing has a high "I." Building factories is capital intensive. It's possible to make a decent case that it succeeded too. The US absolutely dominates the high ROI, high margin industries: Software, financial services, pharma. Design... Intangibles. You can't make a money machine like FB, Pfizer or JPMorgan if (a) marginal costs are real or (b) you need to invest capital in order to grow.