If you want to learn about US military priorities and have 6mins watch Andrew Krepinevich‘s (of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment) interview with Defense News.
F-35C over Pax River; the least useful of the Lighting II Variants?
Highlights include:
1. Defense of undersea cables and networks. 21st century commerce raiding.
2. Counter A2AD (Anti-Access Area Denial, Pentagonese for China’s basic military strategy) technology and employment. Range, stealth (not aircraft but rather undersea forces) and artificial intelligence. In his words, “so if datalinks are broken unmanned systems can still perform at a relatively high degree.”
3. Cyber Operations, as Krepinevich puts it, “Cyber is kinda analogous to air-power during the world wars: we don’t know if it’s the greatest thing since ice cream, much ado about nothing or something in between.”
4. Ground Forces, “the real payer is going to be the ground forces…Nobody is going to try to conquer China. Iran has three times the population of Iraq; so we’ve really priced ourselves out of those operations. What we want is access, not conquest.” That’s a great term, “priced out of operations.” Almost as good as “access not conquest.”
5. Building partner capacity in the developing world and increasing allied participation.
6. JSF. Didn’t expect this and would like a follow up. According to Krepinevich the F-35A might be viable in hardened shelters; the F-35C is at risk because of its lack of range (?); and the F-35B is the real winner with the mobility to operate from austere airfields in defense of the first island chain.
Old, Unhappy, Far-Off Things 
The amount of faith this guy puts in an F-35B that would surely be severely payload-limited if operating from any austere airfield where it was forced to use its STOVL capability really makes me question his knowledge of air power.
Agree. I found that bit to be very strange.
Maybe he’s assuming the the F-35C, based on a carrier, will need to be significantly farther from the battlefield than a bunkered F-35A at Kadena, but who knows… Hard to complain about fuel disparity of 2 nearly identical aircraft.