Sadly, I doubt there's any subterfuge going on. The simplest reason is the must common reason today, the Pentagon has been captured by the defense contractors.

Sadly, I doubt there's any subterfuge going on. The simplest reason is the must common reason today, the Pentagon has been captured by the defense contractors. Today, the damning word is "concurrency." The F-35 can't fight. No matter what the Pentagon says, it simply is not combat operational today. It can't fire its gun. It can't track objects. And it's a dog in the air. Good thing that we put all our eggs in that basket, and the convinced all our allies to join us in this hand basket. The USS Ford is $13 billion dollars, and has problems with it's electromagnetic catapults, it's dual-band radar (so bad, that the radar has been dropped on follow-on ships), and is way over budget, and full of preventable errors. The Littoral Combat Ships are jokes. Made of aluminum with a modular bay that the Navy has recently dropped after deciding that this flagship feature was in the end impractical. The ships are underarmed, and in the official description of the Navy, "not survivable." Oh did I forget to mention that the LCS came out of a competition where the Navy decided to buy both competing designs, and both designs suck? Then there's the Osprey that has notorious accident record, and then in deployment in actual combat it was discovered that it actually can't defend itself. (Shoot it from the front or the sides, because the only gun it might be carrying is in the back.) Finally, the weirdest of all is the announced conversion of the UCLASS unmanned combat vehicle into a tanker.[1] Yes tankers, are important, but its at the expense of a next genertion combat platform in order support legacy Super Hornets, and the craptastic F-35. Maybe, just maybe, this is a ruse. But who knows? [1] https://news.usni.org/2016/02/01/pentagon-to-navy-convert-uclass-program-into-unmanned-aerial-tanker-accelerate-f-35-development-buy-more-super-hornets https://news.usni.org/2016/02/01/pentagon-to-navy-convert-uc...