For just four-hundred-thousand dollars... they bought the flight data and technical blueprints for the Yak’s rotating nozzle. It was a fraction... a tiny fraction... of the billions the Pentagon was prepared to spend.
American engineers took that Soviet 'failure,' refined it with Western precision, and turned a desperate Russian experiment into the mechanical heart of the F-thirty-five-B. The Pentagon bought the keys to the future... for the price of a luxury house."