Do you think it will save costs if the united states moved F-35 manufacturing to China? Quality will be lower but Apple was able to do it with the iPhone without compromising quality.
Sure it would "save costs".....until we get in a shooting war with China and they stop sending us spare parts. Or given concerns about backdoors in Huawei gear, you can be damned sure they would put hardware-level backdoors in fighter jet control systems. So the cost-benefit analysis needs to take into account the degradation of your security posture that comes from having your greatest adversary supplying your equipment.
If we get into a shooting war with China then we can switch to Russia. Last resort is north Korea. Although North Korea is really poor with the equivalent infrastructure changes that happened in China we can build it up to a nuclear super power and North Korea can supply the needed parts for F-35 at a really cheap price.
