Re: Too many cooks spoil the broth
>> Multinational designs usually fail.
Nonsense.
>>The Panavia Tornado being a good example*. * Early variants of the Tornado were vulnerable to ground fire when attacking at low level - ancient Blackburn Buccaneers had to be hurriedly taken out of retirement and sent to the gulf to mark targets so the Tornadoes could bomb from altitude.
*Any* aircraft is vulnerable to ground fire when flying low level, and I wait for you to explain how you think that being designed by an international team makes the airframe more susceptible to it. Buccaneers temporary returns had more to do with it having the equipment while Tornado's still wasn't ready at the time.
As for Tornado, it was quite a success. The platform served four nations, all with different priorities, over nearly four decades, which isn't bad for a platform that was one of the first to be designed for multi-role capabilities. When it came out, it repeatedly beat American platforms like the F-111 in bombing competitions.
>> The F-14 or F-15 could have performed the same missions just as well
The F-14 was a single role aircraft, it was highly expensive to run and was a true a maintenance nightmare which suffered from a number of design problems (for example, the wing sweep mechanism was so poorly designed that it often failed in a way that one wing was stuck in a different position than the other, something was physically impossible with Tornado's wing sweep system). The engines were prone to in-flight flame/outs/engine stalls, and the whole aircraft had a tendency to flat-spin. It was designed around excess power and the needs of carrier operations, but based on technology from the early 50's. It wasn't able to match Tornado's precision, couldn't do most of Tornado's roles, couldn't do low-level penetration, nor could the F-14 offer any of Tornado's other advantages (such like it's short takeoff and landing capability, thanks to reverse thrusters, or a terrain following capable RADAR for computer-controlled low level flying).
The F-15 would have been a closer match, and overall it has shown to be a very good weapon platform. But as with the F-14, the F-15 offered older tech (mechanical flight controls and simpler avionics, Tornado had FBW and much more capable computers), and The F-15 also lacked the low level capabilities or the short takeoff/landing abilities of Tornado. Like many American aircraft types, the F-15, too, was a maintenance nightmare, mostly because it wasn't designed for easy access (ask the Saudis, which have been operating both Tornado and F-15; Tornado spent more time in the air while F-15's were often sitting on the ground because maintenance was much more time consuming than on Tornado, where easy maintenance has been part of the design).
Needless to say that F-15 also wasn't any cheaper.
Then there is the other fact that using American hardware means giving up on a country's own abilities to develop advanced defense tech. Western Europe (including Germany, the country from which the USA exfiltrated military tech and engineers after WW2 to prop up its own defense base) is actually very good at defense tech, often much better than their American counterparts, but also has to fight with constant underfunding.
>> However, those US aircraft wouldn't have provided much profit or employment to the aerospace industries of Britain, Germany and Italy.
Wrong. Germany's aerospace firms did very well from building F-104's in license from Lockheed. They were even able to improve the type with new capabilities, something Italy continued to do when they got theirs from Germany.
What it doesn't do is give those countries control over the technology, and especially with American military kit there always are strings attached. When Lockheed bribed the German government to decide for the F-104 instead of a German designed plane, they already had more advanced designs in the works (and would have competed against American tech), which after the decision were all quickly terminated. The same happened later when Germany developed its own stealth aircraft (MBB Lampyridae), which was also quickly terminated after it was shown to American officials during a factory tour.
It's important for Europe to develop its own defense technology, and unless you want to see further reduction in social services, health care and other government expenditure in a shift to more defense spending then multi-national programs are the way to go.