serenity
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I know something about aviation and the military. Veteran USAF F-111 (Cold War) and F-16 (Desert Storm). Will I do?
The Russians can spin it any way it they want, but the Su-57 program is at least stalled, and the longer it is stalled, institutional inertia is no different than physical inertia, that it will take greater efforts to resume any progress.
Institutions do not like idle money. Same with people -- they cannot be doing nothing. Any project, technological or else, that is not productive will be cancelled at some time down the line. When people inside said stalled program perceives, wrongly or correctly, that the project is in danger of being cancelled, especially when funding is euphemistically said to be 'under review', intellectual productivity drops. Why should they care?
Military projects have a very limited clientele -- the government. It does not matter if it is domestic or foreign, it is still only 'the government'. With a military oriented project, the maker cannot sell his wares to other governments at will. He needs approval from the domestic government and his sales will be tightly controlled. So that still make it only 'the government' as the only client.
I will go out on a limb and say that the the -57 project is essentially -- dead.
While this is true, the government in this analogy may wish to allow this project to be sold externally so that the organisations can recover expenses and maybe even make money that contributes to tax. If they let it die the way you suggest, it puts other military contractors in an uneasy state, fearing any domestic failure would be total project failure. While this is mostly true everywhere in the world, maybe such a costly program like PAKFA, can be recovered and money saved and/or made by exporting the product in a way that doesn't breach confidentiality or threaten origin nation (if and where possible). Of course the issue there will be who will be willing to spend serious money on a platform if the Russians decide to water it down so completely, as making it close to useless for the purchasing nation. But that's neither here nor there. Just speculating on the feasibility of these sorts of decisions. Above is all assuming PAKFA is dead... which I don't believe is true but for the purpose of this post... surely some military projects (even ones that began as domestic gov only) can be redeveloped to find other governments as potential clients.