The 800 Pound Gorilla for the JSF

It is that any nation operating the aircraft will be shut down in a very short time without direct US support.

As Bill Sweetman notes here, if the JSF progresses as anticipated, it will drive all other competitors out of business. Sometime around 2020, you could see the Typhoon, Gripen, Rafale and F-18 being unsellable, because, like the Italians and the F-104S, the nations using them cannot afford upgrades, because they have to go it alone.

While the Gripen model of using existing systems essentially unmodified in their aircraft might offer the ability to make support and upgrades affordable, there is a very real possibility that there will be no fighter industry left outside of the US/JSF and Russia, but the folks doing this do not have a good track record:

There hasn't (for example) been one successful stealth warplane program since the F-117. The A-12 and Comanche were cancelled outright. The B-2 cost tens of billions to fix and is so costly to operate that efforts to sell more than 21 jets were unsuccessful. The F-22 works, but the current debate over whether to acquire more than 183 jets is driven to a great extent by the startling cost of maintenance and upgrades. JSF itself is already two and a half years behind the original schedule, and further problems are certainly not out of the question at this stage.

If your track record is Ishtar and Howard the Duck, and you tell me that you've got something that beats Gone With The Wind and Star Wars, you are going to have to prove it with more than a PowerPoint, or "trust me, but it's secret."

(emphasis mine)

This is something to think about, and it's my favorite defense procurement quote of the year, but this is not the gorilla that I mentioned.

The 800 lb gorilla is the fact, as Bill Sweetman notes, that any nation adopting the JSF will be completely unable to field those aircraft without active and aggressive support from the US/Lockheed Martin:

The JSF is unique in the degree of integration in its information systems. So far, for example, it has no open-standard transmit datalink, at least in stealth mode. The automated logistics system will continuously transmit operational information back to Fort Worth. Not only is it a coalition-optimized airplane, it's hard to see how it could be operated at all without direct, constant US support.

He further notes that the JSF will be shipped without a jammer, which will not be an issue for the US, which has EA-6Bs and shortly E/F-18-Gs to provide standoff jamming, but is a real problem for other nations, who do not operated dedicated stand off jammers, and it is nigh impossible for them to retrofit such a system into a tightly integrated airframe...Truth be told, I'm not sure that they could even find power, much less signal to do so.

Finally, the JSF will not communicate with legacy aircraft. The US is planning to handle this with a MADL (the stealthy communications system installed on the JSF) on something like a business jet that will be well behind the combat zone, but again, any other nation operating the plane will not have this capability.

If I were a nation looking at operating the aircraft under these circumstances *cough* Israel *cough*, I'd be very concerned.