My guess is they're not aiming their sights at the Pentagon, but rather medium sized country exports. Plenty of countries want a modern yet cheap to maintain air capability.
Take the recent failure to sell the SuperHornet and the Rafale to the Brazilian Air Force: they lost the bid because both Boeing and Dassault refused to do a complete technology transfer to the Brazilians. So the BAF went with the Grippen because Saab gave them the blueprints and code to everything, to the point that Brazil can make their own Grippens in the future and their own weapon systems without sharing information with the Swedes.
But then again, given their low development costs, who's to say that Textron wouldn't approve such a production model for this plane? It's not like Saab is losing money on the Brazil deal.
I would presume this means a lot of middle eastern and northern African countries - most of whom are engaged in some kind of civil war.
I'm wondering how this affect a company's conscious to know their planes are being used to support some pretty sketchy governments.
Think South America, larger SE Asian economies, etc. This is all speculation, so meh.
And I wouldn't subestimate those old Soviet planes, the Indians have updated and overhauled the old Mig-21 to the point that is a very capable fighter jet able to compete against a block 50 F-16. There are many companies offering updates for such planes and those are much cheaper than brand-new units.
In any case those countries are more far more likely to buy drones instead, which is why the number of companies in that sector is huge.
They will not require an "all new" support structure. The same basic facilities will work for any single-seat fighter-bomber. The main things needed will be special tooling and ground carts. These are usually provided as part of the purchase package and may already be factored into the $20m price tag.
> new ground radars
Ground-based radar sets are irrelevant.
> and data systems
All those Soviet bird upgrades tear out every piece of of Soviet electronics and refit them with new, Western systems. Data links and similar systems will need to be upgraded anyway. On top of that, the Scorpion and the upgrade packages are going to use compatible data link technology, so an air force can even mix Scorpions with Soviet retreads.
This is built from civilian components, isn't it?
Even the same turbofan engines...
Case in point the old Mig-21 had a so-so radar from the start, the Bison version has a state-of-the-art radar able to target and fire at multiple objectives at the same time.
And that's just once component of many that were upgraded.
So my guess is that the supply of ex-USSR planes is going to gradually dry up over the next decade, leaving only refurbs and aircraft that have been stuck at the back of a hangar. The price will climb -- after all, Russia is still exporting newer, better versions -- and sooner or later the lowering cost curve of the largely-COTS-based Scorpion will overlap with the rising cost curve of keeping the old Soviet kit airworthy.
(India ... is not a good comparison. India builds nuclear reactors and sent a home-built probe to Mars on a home-built space launcher. India is developing its own supersonic strike fighter. Upgrading old Soviet kit is something they've got a lot of experience at. I expect Scorpion to sell to the sort of governments who don't have much of an aerospace industry. Argentina, for example, who've bought no new warplanes since the kicking they took in 1982. Or Iran, if a decade hence they come off the US government's shit list and turn into the west's BFF against wahhabism.)
Boeing is even building an upgraded F-15 with stealth, and many would-be buyers of the F-35 like South Korea are now considering that 42 year old plane over the brand new model.
The countries you name actually DO have an aerospace industry, you should've googled that before. Iran in particular had to create one after the embargo.
New planes of these types are not exactly bargain basement items; an F15-K will cost you around $100M, an Su-27 around $32M, an Su-35 about $65M.
The Scorpion, at $20M new, is therefore rather cheaper than an F15 or Su-27, unless you hit the second-hand market ... in which case you have the maintenance issues I alluded to.
(As for Iran's ability to build jet fighters, the Azarakhsh and Saeqeh look to be partial clones of the old Northrop F-5, and may or may not live up to promises; numbers built of each type are in single digits. The Argentinian military aerospace sector makes the Iranian one look like a front-rank power.)
Returning to the article, the Scorpion is an interesting example of sophisticated mil-tech becoming a commodity game. A brand-new, $20m multi-role fighter that can be maintained using COTS parts, with a per-hour cost at half of a MiG-21? It's an indication that, in time, any company or state with a reasonable level of sophistication and access to the international tech market could develop, from a purely technical sense, near-peer status to the world's top-line militaries. Iran may be too isolated to make that play, but I could see an Argentina being there within ten years.
As for the aerospace industry of those countries again you are missing the point: they would rather invest the billions it would take to buy a decent amount of modern jets in their own companies to grow the local sector than to essentially subsidize foreign conglomerates.
Case in point until 1994 Brazil had no domestic-built planes. Now Embraer is an international player in the aerospace industry with exports to many other countries.
Embraer has been building planes for the Brazilian Air Force, both self-designed and licensed-production, since the early 70s.
The reality is before the privatization Embraer was pretty much a nobody in the aerospace industry, unlike now.
The problem isn't that the designs are old. It's that the physical airframes are old.
The entire F-15C fleet has been grounded multiple times in the past decade due to failures related to the sheer age and wear on the airframes in inventory. One of those failures included a plane literally breaking apart in midair during training.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/11/28/f15.grounded/
>Boeing is even building an upgraded F-15 with stealth
Boeing put together a demonstrator with some stealth enhancements. To date there have been no buyers and they've been shopping it around for several years.