What ORAC said.
Absolutely, seriously no way would you get useful capability in 2014. That's not from the F-35 "bashers" - who by the way have been predicting cost and schedule trends far more accurately than the Fort Worth suits or the JPO munchkins, for the past four years - but from the Technical Baseline Review, the first half-a$$ed-honest insider review of the program in 16 years.
And this "too big to fail" argument is beginning to get old. What "too big to fail" means is what it's always meant: redefine success to match what can actually be achieved. The program has already failed to deliver SDD on schedule, and failed to deliver SDD on cost. The overrun on SDD is in the same order of magnitude as the entire A400M program including 170-plus production airframes.
GAO and Navair have both projected that the program will also fail to deliver on operating costs (which were originally supposed to be lower than F-16, then redefined to equal, but now look a lot higher) and GAO and CAPE have predicted that it will fail on acquisition costs, in the process gutting every other US aircraft program in sight.
Did Gates put the F-35B on probation, and did UK MoD walk away from it and scupper one of its carriers, because they believed what a cranky Anglo-American journalist and three OCD Australian bloggers told them? Or because what they were finally hearing out of TBR was not (by a million miles) the same happy horse**** they'd been fed for the previous decade? Because the TBR said that it was too soon to tell whether or not the F-35B effort would fail to yield a practical airplane at any reasonable price?
Affordability is not a subjective criterion, unless you're Bill Gates buying groceries. Most of the export customers are dealing at best with a fixed budget ceiling. Unit price up, numbers down, until eventually the political leaders ask, quite sensibly, what you plan to do with a force that's so small that you can't deploy with a coalition, maintain homeland defense and sustain the force at the same time. Goodbye air force.
By the way, for the all-wise supporters of the F-35, a lot of the F-16 criticisms of the 1970s were right. It was and is a good design - but what saved it from being another F-5E or F-104 was Moore's Law, which neither critics nor proponents saw coming.