Glad Rag,
That's the point. We could have got BAe to bang out Gripens for us and accepted that we were not going to try and keep up with the USAF in stealth but continue to provide a legacy PGM bomb truck and escort platform at lower cost or in greater numbers for the same cost. The downside was that we couldn't reasonably take on a modern IADS alone and it would've been less "prestigious".
The flip side of this is that we have a tiny front line who's scale is too small to provide any serious flexibility.
S41