Canada

Again, the problem with looking at those costs is that we only have the infrastructure and the ability to maintain pilots for a certain number of air craft. This isn't a scenario where we can easily go the zerg rush route of having many more aircraft at a lower cost per unit. If we want to have an effective air force, that air force needs to focus on quality over quantity.

And the math leans even harder in favour of quality when you factor in how heavily stealth and sensors affect air warfare today. A fifth gen fighter like the F-35 can destroy many times its own number of older generation aircraft - even heavily upgraded ones - because stealth is basically an "I win" button. If your enemy cannot detect you before you detect them, everything else is irrelevant. A Canadian air force armed with F-35s would have stood up to many, many times our number of outdated Russian aircraft. Even their Su-57 isn't a true fifth gen aircraft and its stealth capabilities are pathetic.

This is the problem with moving away from it. What other options do we have for a fifth gen stealth fighter? There aren't any because everyone who would have put money into developing one decided to put money into the F-35 program instead. It was supposed to be the 5.56 of air combat, the standard solution for all of NATO. Solutions like the Grippen, Eurofighter or Rafale simply do not work against a peer adversary. Remember that we have to keep this thing in service for decades. We can't just buy a new fighter in a few years.

Going into mid 21st century warfare without a stealth fighter would be like going into WW2 without machine guns and tanks.