You seem to be stuck on that one thing. No, I don't see India as an enemy, or even becoming one. But they're not buying from us. They're buying from Russia. And helping Russia keep its production lines working and design teams busy. And don't think for a second Russia is not an adversary. We may not be toe to toe with the Ruskies with ICBM's at 20 paces like we were during the cold war, and the Berlin Wall may have fallen, but we're still adversaries.
And who else do the Russians sell military technology to? China seems to come to mind. Oh and they (China) are licensing and building Russian tech. And engineering their own from the designs and mfg experience.
So lets just throw out a theoretical conflict with China. China has what, 1.5 Billion people. How many under arms? Think maybe they could throw a thousand or two 4th gen fighters against our 187 Raptors?
As I mentioned previously; Russia showed during WWII they could throw shear numbers of basic equipment against a superiorly equipped (technologically) and trained force and drive them back.
BTW: We used a similar tactic with our 8th Airforce over Germany. We lost a lot of aircrews, but we just kept coming. The arsenal of democracy just kept pumping out the machinery.
We're not doing that so much anymore. In fact it seems we're shutting it down. The F-22 is a fine aircraft. They F-35 may end up being an adequate one, but it will never be a jack of all trades, ore even a master of some, or one. And we may never produce it in enough numbers even if it was.
We are adversaries with Russia because we have a government full of people with your mindset, looking out from the borders and seeing enemies and threats everywhere.
If we really thought strategically about things, we’d realize we should be working much closer with Russia to be partners instead of adversaries. A Russo-American partnership, combined with our natural Anglosphere alliance with England, Canada, Australia and India, is an unbeatable combination.
Russia itself has far more value to us as Americans than nonsense like defending “freedom” by poking Russia in the eye in Georgia, South Ossetia, Chechnya, Transnistria, Kosovo, or Bosnia. The easiest way to “defeat” the Russian power threat is to co-opt it to our own joint ends, so that there would not be a reason to ever fight.
Russia in WWII was a much stronger country than now. It had the 60 million people of Ukraine and Byelorussia in it, and the cannon fodder of the Asian Steppes to draw on. All that is now gone.
F35’s, F22’s, etc. Who cares? Why aren’t we developing the equivalent of an AK-47 as an airplane? A plane that is simple, elegant, easily maintained, easily used, easily updated, always works, never out of style. The reason we will have so few F35’s and F22’s and all the rest is because we are constantly burdened wasting money trying for the next techno-gadget airplane hangar queen, instead of producing actual functional weapons that are always available for work.
Imagine if the Army issued light machine guns to its troops that required 30 hours of maintenance and oiling for every hour of firing! You think we would win any wars that way?