They should just scrap the F-35 right now and move to the next thing. In today’s age there is absolutely no reason to have an airframe that is a compromise in so many ways.

Take the sensors suite and electronics package of the F-35 and build airframes that do what you want. Make them modular and plug and play. The airframe is the cheap part of the package. Just add some more or less standardized software and go.

You could have a 4.5 generation non-stealthy bomb truck with F-35 sensors. You could have a stealthy tubby strike airframe with F-35 sensors. You could have a stealthy dedicated air superiority airframe with the sensors. You could have a high and very fast interceptor version with the sensors.

Standardize on the software as much as you can instead of the airframe. Airframes are relatively easy. We’ve got 75 years of building jets and we’ve reached the point where the limits of what can be done are more about the human body than technology. The engineering behind building an airframe that will do anything we want it to do isn’t too hard. But the air frame isn’t what makes the F-35 special. So why take the “special” part and force it into an inferior airframe designed to do ten different roles instead of being the best at one or two.