Frostchamber - I'm not arguing that other programs have experienced problems, but the F-35 is special in many ways. It has never experienced a delay due solely to a cut in funding or to customer indecisiveness (the latter plagued Typhoon for more than a decade); the execution-based delays - getting things wrong and underestimating time and cost to fix) are up there among the record-holders; and its size makes the impact of those problems uniquely large.
And given that the next few years' upgrades will be equal to some entire acquisition programs, it's not the time to forget the history.
Brat - Thanks for the valuable information about Chinese and Russian politics. None of us knew that stuff.