If a country's air force is capable of performing at an airshow, especially with close proximity formation flying, that means mastery of the aircraft is not in question, even if such skills are confined to only the elites. The questions then are what happens to those skills ? Why are they not disseminated to other airmen ? If not, what are the barriers to that dissemination ? Not every soldier in the army is a sniper quality marksman, but every soldier must possess the minimum skills with a rifle.
Mastery of the aircraft often -- if not usually -- internally encourages exploration into other areas of combat expertise. The individual pilot is motivated because now he understood his new skills' boundaries. The issue now is the institutions of the air force if those institutions are amenable to pilots' further education and training.
Therein lies the problem for countries that must import their defense. In speaking for the air force, which is the usually most technologically complex branch of service as not every country has a navy, the lack of progress in advanced education and training usually demoralizes that air force. As they have to buy the jets, their budget often do not have excess funds for advanced training. Whereas if the country has its own defense industry, combat aircraft can be custom tailored to meet unique needs, which usually motivate the government to allocate funds to develop advanced education and training for its air force.
Going back to the army example. Not every soldier is a sniper, but for the air force, practically every pilot must be within a certain range of proficiency to each other, in other words, every fighter pilot is a 'sniper' equivalent due to the technologically complex systems the air force must learn and maintain. Not advancing those skills is like restricting that army sniper only to the ranges, not the woods, and only to 100 meters. Once a person is trained to an advanced skill, the odds of having that person being bored increases unless he is continually stressed.
