Did Hayao Miyazaki take over Air Force procurement, or what?
EDIT: Ah, they also reduce the lifecycle to 10 - 15 years. Still wild!
The goal is to create a constant pipeline of new planes with short lead times, so that they don't need to have extended lifetimes with expensive maintenance. Personally I feel that's a better approach overall for many mobile capital-intensive systems: military hardware, public transportation and so on.
As the interview points out, smaller, more-frequent procurements reduce the risk to suppliers as well. Currently every weapons system project is a existential risk to contractors, so they quite naturally try to push as much back as possible. And so we wind up with parts being built in every Congressional district at vast expense and added complexity.
Your count at least seems reasonable.
> The main difference is that the Air Force would flip from spending the majority of fighter program costs upfront instead of at the end of the aircraft’s life. To continuously design new fighter jets, the service would keep multiple vendors constantly under contract for the development of new planes, choosing a new design about every eight years. To make a business case that is profitable for industry, it would then buy batches of about 50-80 aircraft every year.
> The result is a 25 percent increase in development costs and an 18 percent increase in production costs. However, the price of modernizing aircraft would drop by 79 percent while sustainment costs are basically cut in half, Roper wrote in the paper.
> “I can’t make both ends of the life cycle go away; industry has to make a profit somewhere,” Roper said. “And I’m arguing in the paper that if you get to choose what color of money you use for future air superiority, make it research, development and production because it’s the sharp point of the spear, not the geriatric side that consumes so much of our resources today.”