The performance of fighter engines are the result of many trade off. Some of the major one are reliability, fuel economy, and thrust. Given the pressure that is being placed upon F35 to get costs down. That may have resulted in slight reduction in average thrust to gain advantage in other two areas that reduce overall costs. Overall I find it impossible to really judge performance of engines based upon claims by manufacture because we have no idea what the trade offs were made in coming up with those figures. That’s why you can have two engines types that appear to perform close to each other by stats but in real world you find one clearly better then other.

Civilian aerospace is not going to go away in Europe. Military aerospace may diminish over time but that will be a slow process. Currently were in situation where civilian tech leads military tech so potential for a rebound military tech is present. That doesn’t mean I’m not pessimistic European military aerospace in the long run. But the idea that JSR is pushing is laughable the US auto industry has been in decline for decades. It hasn’t done city’s like Detroit any good that there were mass of skill workers that could be transitioned into aerospace available.

You would be dead wrong, the US voter does not have a monopoly on being a silly nationalistic chap on its bad days

I expect that German auto industry wont be happy with that outcome. In fact I would say they would be downright hostile to any German government that allowed such a outcome.

How do you think that a Der Spiegel editorial saying “The biggest military acquision program in three decades goes to the Donald” would look like for an SPD/CDU German government?

I think it would go down a bit better then a report that US is putting a Tariff on German auto exports into US.

Because the Germans and French don’t have unlimited funds to develop a MPA and also a new fighter aircraft. The new fighter program will be a black hole sucking down a huge percentage of available RnD for the next decade. Other programs will suffer and A320 MPA is an entire program built to duplicate P8 for a plane that a best has few hundred export orders if it succeeds. It will also be a decade minimum before it is ready and will suffer by being late to market versus P8.

If they build an A320 MPA it really indicates that they wont be developing a new fighter aircraft.

Incorrect plane were not shot down.

To elaborate on my original response and to illustrate why I was so dismissive of french position.

They knew from the time they designed those missiles with US components. That they would have to get US approval to export them. They chose to use those components anyway. Now their upset that something they knew was going to happen has happened. It was entirely predictable that US was not going to allow export to the middle east.

If France wants to have clear ability to sale arms exports, then it shouldn’t use US parts. There is cost to that choice both in weapon system cost and time to duplicate whatever US component are required. Then you have secondary effects of taking those french resources away from other things to duplicate US components. And then the long term the drifting apart of the US and France on defense cooperation caused by refusal to use US sourced components. Lastly you have the potential loss of french exports to US that such a policy would inevitably result in as US returned the favor.

All of those things were very much considered when France designed that missile. Now they find what they knew going into it. That exporting said missiles to the middle east was going to be a non starter for US. So they sit and bitch about it even though they knew all along it was likely outcome.

My guess is low production combined with generational turn over in engineers.