A good article. I’ve long had the feeling that the F-35 was a basically good initial design that has been compromised by being asked to do too many things. No single design can do everything, and efforts to break that rule usually end up with a mediocre plane that does nothing particularly well, and/or a project that ends up costing far, far more than it was ever supposed to.
YUP! A 21st Century version of McNamara’s Folly — the multi-service F-111.
Close, but you give it too much credit. The design was a compromise from the beginning, there is simply no way any aircraft can perform multiple functions as well as a single purpose design.
It is slow, heavy, short-legged for air superiority.
It has limited range and payload for attack.
It is single engine, which is NOT what the navy wants, regardless of what the Admirals say now.
It's not VTOL as designed, has morphed into STOVL, and again has range and payload problems.
Those are problems with the original design, and production/real world problems are much worse than can be imagined.
It is a pig in a poke, and so much has already been invested in time and treasure that it is insanity to continue forward, and insanity to cancel it.
It takes huge Government to create huge problems.