Thats a great callout. Beginning of WW1 era worked kind of liked i am talking about, companies would make prototype guns, and the army would test them all out

Thats a great callout. Beginning of WW1 era worked kind of liked i am talking about, companies would make prototype guns, and the army would test them all out and choose the one they liked the best. The companies that lost the bids might and did go out of business. But relative cost to make a prototype gun was relatively low. Im sure there was quite a bit of good old boy network going on, but at least we have evidence of the different prototypes being competed and assessed against. But something like modern fighter jets are just too expensive for a company to have a working prototype first. But I would argue thats a sign that a nation shouldnt be investing so heavily in things like F35s to begin with. I think most estimates have an actual peer level shooting war result in most air plane fleets being wiped out pretty quickly by missiles and destroying the bases. Why does Russian need an F35 equivalent when they can produce more than enough SAM missiles to destroy it? And the time to actually replace an F35 that gets destroyed is what? A year or more? Time to make missiles isnt a year. The nation that has designs for a "good enough" plane that can go from factory sky to in 1 to 3 months will win that conflict, and the United States doesnt explore that style at all. Even though its the exact method that helped them win their last major conflict!