I have posted about this issue before. What Korea need the most from us is "market/buyer" to bring the economic scale down to acceptable level thus making the cost of the fighter cheaper. It will cost more per-airframe compare to F-35 and the
only thing that KFX has more is range and speed. I predict KFX will cost around the price of Rafale.
For us we have to buy 48-60 block 1 fighter that is unproven, Sokor can handle this risk cuz they have F-35 and other advance fighter. How about us?
We simply cant afford the risk. One of the reason I support our govt to reduce the KFX purchase down to 16. We can simply buy more if its turn out good.
India's teja, rafale, gripen, even eurofighter are few example how the fighters can be expensive if they dont meet decent economic scale (total fighter sales). Now imagine if we Individually making indigenous fighter, I cant even imagine how much its going to cost per-fighter. What we have with Sokor is great plan but with poor execution (cost and benefit wise). I personally prefer we pay more but get so much more or just simply dont do it at all.
Coba kita lihat dari perspective yg berbeda. F-35 in other perspective is to promote US world domination/hegemony thru US private company jet program funded/build/support by many countries. Europeans now see this, their homegrown european made fighters simply cant compete with the F-35 price and capabilities thus slowly killing their own aviation industry. Perhaps thats why some of them are now trying to develop their own Gen-6 fighters
wihtout the involvement of any US companies. Even German and France wanted to reduce US content in their military products to 0. Trying to shake US hegemony inside their own products?
Its not just that, let me introduce to one of F-35 advanced feature ALIS (Autonomic Logistics Information System). You can check it out here
https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/autonomic-logistics-information-system-alis.html
It sounds good for maintenance purposes right? But hold on a sec check out the bold word;
" ALIS integrates a broad range of capabilities including operations, maintenance, prognostics, supply chain, customer support services, training and technical data. A single, secure information environment provides users with up-to-date information on any of these areas using web-enabled applications on a distributed network "
There are some rumour that this sytems also store any mission information systems operated by any F-35 fighter who conected to ALIS. We know that F-35 featured great camera systems right? So any mission, any where in the world can be logged and see by the US? Another hegemony program by US? No formal confirmation information about this feature but surely something that we must be aware of.