Actually the Tu95 were grounded after a series of crash (they are not that good ;) ) (nice pictures of the new bombers used by russia here <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mirror.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;uk-news&#x2F;raf-typhoon-jets-scramble-intercept-6426538" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mirror.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;uk-news&#x2F;raf-typhoon-jets-scramb...</a>)<p>And I cannot find the UK articles from 1 year ago saying the exact problem with typhoon and why UK wanted to replace them with F35. I remembered something about costs, availability attrition and budget. Like typhoon were to expensive and that 24&#x2F;7 battle readiness was kind of a joke given the budget.<p>I was in the french navy for my conscription. The aeronaval would have preferred F16 over rafale ~2000 for exactly this: 
1 rafale = 10 F16 (at the time) and OPEX of rafale &gt;&gt; F16. 
And they could have had another diesel carrier thus france could have had a fully usable aeronaval task force for the same price.<p>Anyway: cellular grids where not that developed yet, but efficient distributed radar were. And every &quot;refinment&quot; is kind of another order of magnitude in the equation. Harder to measure, harder to counter, harder to build but it can be anticipated : every generations are almost an order of magnitude more expensive.<p>Can you see a pattern? Stealth like aircraft (Typhoon, Rafale, F35, F22) are hard to sell because they cost a lot due to complexity (in software notably). Thus government HAVE to subsidize them ...<p>Thus, people try to make them polyvalent BY DESIGN (waterfall model) and like any jack of all trades they tend to master none of them and inflates OPEX and KPEX with erosion of the benefits and a LONG development time that make them likely to be obsolete when delivered.<p>A lot can be said on the history of aircraft industry. I dare say we lost the art of being smart that requires some fast feedback loops (agile but correctly done) with minimal correct design (waterfall but correctly done) and cost efficiency.<p>That is the difference between the spitfire and the Me109.<p>Can a general purpose warbird be built during peace time?<p>I do not think so. They are like hammers built without knowing which nail will need to be hammered or may be screwed.<p>But simple cells (F4, mirage, F16) with awesome lines (ok, I am found of nice looking planes so it is not serious) that can sustain modifications (like the spitfire) have proven to be good planes ... on the long run when you have good workers, engineers, (tests) pilots, industrial able to make them evolve in a reasonable time and price constraint.<p>The quality of out warplanes reflect the actual problem with our civil economy : Quality and costs do not matter when industries relies on finance and not production for making benefits.<p>Bonus : This guy was amazing <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jeffrey_Quill" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jeffrey_Quill</a> &lt;== tests pilots. Kind of a badass QA man like most of the tests pilots in great planes history.