Anyway, glad to see the USAF was building something useful in the background. Wouldn’t be shocked if it was a small team with few resources.
The F-35 was a misconceived project and burned money and time in its early stages. It's been beaten back into shape today however, largely because Ash Carter switched Lockhead from a cost plus contract to one where they have the lion's share of any non trivial cost overruns moving forward. How shocking that suddenly LM got the marginal cost to build a new F-35 under 90 million as a result.
His case in point was the B2 which was supposed to got to Lockheed as they had the better tech and could have made it cheaper but instead they gave the contract to Northrop to prevent Lockheed having too large share of the defense pie and to keep Northrop afloat as they were denied other lucrative contracts in the past.
* of course most of the work, being warplanes and a ship, was intended to break things :-/.
This is not terrible in principle (assuming you support having a military at all) in order to preserve a diversity of sources. This mentality (from both military and private sector) is why AMD has a license to produce x86 instruction set hardware (although that license may not matter so much today): up into the late 70s people would not buy parts if there was not an independent second source.
Unfortunately this managed competition was destroyed in the 90s — not the managed part but the competition part.
This same reason justifies the expensive and horrifically distorting agricultural subsidies. The principle is to make sure there is adequate food production even when it is not economically self justifying so that people don’t starve due to lack of food supplies. You can argue that the system doesn’t work properly (hint: it doesn’t) but at the minimal baseline it is better than not existing.
As the 2008 and 2020 crises demonstrate, this kind of baseline diversity has withered away over the last 40 years, especially but hardly exclusively in the US, and made the whole system more fragile.