Re: There's a marketing explanation.
"The F-35 offers an unprecedented and revolutionary level of stealth characteristics to vastly redue it's probability of detection, with state of the art measures to reduce optical detection from a ground breaking 33km, and can remain undetectable by observers at ranges of up to 9km in attack mode."
It's just another way of ensuring that all targets can be prosecuted, especially if they take pictures of an F-35 in action. Given that's likely to be quite an exclusive snap for a number of years, the US is simply protecting it's image rights.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
