Very relevant debate. It may be apocryphal but someone said that if current R&D and military budget trends continue even the USAF will only be able to afford to acquire a single aircraft by the middle of the century! There needs to be the same kind of R&D cost paradigm shift that there has been in personal electronics. Interesting to note that Airbus has just opened a facility in Silicon Valley with a view to absorbing some of this low cost, thinking outside the box, culture.
The Scorpion is a good example of what can be done and while it's hardly "low cost", it's R&D budget compared to that of e.g. the F35's would be barely measurable. Someone else once said that, not necessarily just with respect to aircraft, if you are prepared to settle for 90% of the capability you can get it for a fraction of the cost and therefore afford many more units. After all one aircraft/ship/tank can only be in one place at a time.
Using latest off-the-shelf computing technology both for design and operational capability plus Scaled Composite / Skunk Works-style rapid prototyping, could surely produce something far more cost-effective than the current turgid, inflexible, military-industrial vested-interest complex manages?