> The billion-dollar question here is really whether or not developing another new fighter could result in an overall reduction in cost without creating a reduction in capability.

Since this is HN your bullcrap-meter should be going off here just as if somebody told you throwing away the the Linux kernel and rewriting it in Rust would improve performance, while reducing the number of CVEs - oh and this whole business would only take a year or two while maintaining ABI compatibility with existing packages.