Congress spent the 00s competing to raise the pay and benefits of Our Warfighters and thereby landed the Pentagon with massive costs that will inevitably increase.
Which is why everything is predicated on a real BRAC exercise (yes, I know!) and most of the options hack away at the US Army.
So the F-35 can and probably will be safe from termination, but nobody seriously imagines that the current, on-the-books plan - sustained deliveries of 120/year to the DoD - can be afforded at all. Anything close to that and there is no new bomber and other things go by the wayside as well. But significantly smaller quantities risk death-spiral territory - F-35Bs getting towards $200 m a pop in full production - unless some miracle-worker can achieve some major cost efficiencies
So what you're suggesting, is that the A-model is the least useful/relevant to Pacific Operations, but is required in production to keep the numbers up. I wonder whether that means there's a trade-off in variant numbers vs force structure. Up the B and C numbers (there's plenty of room on those CVN decks) at the expense of A-models, trim the USAF number of TFS/TFW, with the small number of As aimed at fwd deployed units in Korea / Japan. Concentrate on maintaining bomb wing numbers......