AWST (Ares):
JSF Full Rate Production Slips Again 
Pentagon acquisition boss Ashton Carter has just amended his acquisition decision memorandum (ADM) delaying the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, slipping the start of full-rate production by another six months. Milestone C approval to exit low rate initial production and start full-rate, multi-year buys is now planned for April 2016, if (unlike every comparable program in the last 30 years) nothing else goes wrong.
The change reflects the fact that it's not enough to finish initial operational test and evaluation (IOT&E) before declaring Milestone C. There has to be an IOT&E report that details the fixes for any problems that turn up in testing.
It is not certain whether this change will mean yet another batch of LRIP aircraft. However, even before that, the latest restructuring has put the JSF program above the normal limit for LRIP - ten per cent of the total US production run. If the aircraft put on contract in 2016 are added to LRIP, well over 600 aircraft will be on order - making "low rate" something of a misnomer. Whether Congress will tolerate concurrency on that scale remains to be seen.