Disclaimer: This is a politics-free question coming from someone whose flying experience extends to a whole fifteen minutes on the Cessna 152.
This outrageously-expensive thrust vectoring thing, then. It seems to me to allow the aircraft to make very abrupt pitch changes without actually changing the direction of flight, presenting the belly of the thing to the oncoming air and slowing down to a near-stop in the process. At that point, as it hangs almost motionless in the air, I'm fairly confident I could bring it down with a spud gun let alone some form of sophisticated anti-aeroplane device.
How is this abrupt-pitch-excursion thing actually useful? Don't canards on the Typhoon have the same effect?
P