All this begs the question, if 5 years or more from now, the US DoD or one of its arms (NAVY, MARINES, USAF) come to their senses and decide to seriously reduce order volumes ,will they also cut back on the amount of work they (US Companies) get and use more suppliers from its 'partner' nations?
I somehow seriously doubt that.
There is a reason that even the Dutch with their "official" order for 37 planes will not fully and officially commit before 2015, like they said last week.
One thing seems ever more certain, some of the partners are going to be royally shafted when severe order reductions come into effect, the Americans have done it before with every single STEALTH program and most of the other big military programs, with the ongoing sequestration and the rapidly rising debt levels something will have to give.
All this combined with the fact that the US is once again in a post War period (not unlike Post-Vietnam) with an ongoing crisis and a declining popularity of the military ,not the men but rather the organization as a whole, could very well mean that the defense budget will be cut much more than many realize today.
Officially LM insists on keeping the original order volumes from all of its partners ,I bet even the Canadians who still seem to be suffering from severe cold-feet up until today.
Reality is that only the most oblivious F35 fans believe that the F35 will be produced in the quantities originally predicted, it all seems to come down to a game of chicken whereby the first ones to really officially reduce their orders with LM to more believable levels will be the ones that will have to suffer the most reduction in work share.
I wouldn't be to surprised if we see some surprise moves whereby the bigger customers decide to delay their orders (for whatever reason) just to make sure that they keep the option of cancelling most of their orders ultimately but keep as big a share of the work as possible (eg F35C for US NAVY, UK F35's, Italian F35's,....)