My skepticism isn't limited to just the F-35. Back in 2004 or so, I was a pretty heavy supporter of the USMC's EFV, but since then, I've reconsidered my stance, based on the changing global arms export climate -- we live in a world where a transnational terrorist organization (Hizbollah) has a large force of anti-ship missiles.
Really, things are changing pretty fast in regards to military technology, computing and sensor power is getting cheaper and cheaper and SatNav is proliferating -- we have a whole bunch of constellations going up:
Galileo (EU) - Global System by 2014
GLONASS (Russia) - Global system
COMPASS (China) - Global system by 2020.
Baidou (China) -- Regional around Asia/West Pacific
IRNSS (India) -- Regional around India, extends to Persian gulf.
QZSS (Japan) -- Regional around Asia.
The chances of China or Russia selectively degrading their systems in concordance with US requests is...minimal to say the least.
Tying into that is the proliferation of cheap Cruises. Iran if it wanted to, could knock off it's expensive BOMB PROGRAM, and pour that money into spamming forth a whole bunch of cheap 1,000~ km cruise missiles using one of the above mentioned SatNav constellations and placing them on TELs throughout the Iranian heartland.
There'd be enough range to hold pretty much the entire US military presence in the Gulf hostage from firing locations inside the interior of Iran.
Same principle with North Korea, albeit on a simpler basis, as distances would be short enough to use solid rocket propulsion (ATACMS has a range of 300~ km).
