During military conflict, preserving lives of valuable and highly trained personnel has been paramount for USA. With a huge amount of resources and manpower ava

During military conflict, preserving lives of valuable and highly trained personnel has been paramount for USA. With a huge amount of resources and manpower available to the US, effectively the entire western world, materiel is essentially replaceable but pilots and crew are extremely finite. They can just make another plane. Yes, it's 100 million dollars. But when you print dollars and the entire western world serves to make these jets (2% of GDP), the pilots are going to be the limiting factor. I think every aspect of the plane's production can simply be fairly rapidly scaled up, except for the pilots and the forgings. What also hurts is damaging the plane's reputation. That is costly beyond calculation.