When I think of military aircraft now, I tend to imagine them taking off from a carrier, bombing a military target (or equally likely, a house, school, hospital, wedding etc), then flying back.
It's not and that is part of the basis of the F-35, if I understand it correctly, to fight future battles not past ones. A very common problem in military history is people who fought the last war, leading to things like cavalry charges against machine guns. Here are three ways to think about the F-35 and the change in technology that I've read elsewhere (I'm not a practitioner or expert):
First, someone thought to do empirical research into what actually wins in air-to-air encounters, rather than relying on theories. In Vietnam (the last time the US had more than a few air-to-air encounters), 80% of battles were over before the losers knew they had begun.[0] Contrary to the Hollywood image of mano-a-mano dogfights, the loser was basically shot in the back without warning.[1] Situational awareness is the key, according to the research. The F-35 is built around situational awareness: Sensors, stealth (counter-measure against enemy sensors), integration with other sensor systems (the plane's display shows not only its own sensor output, but also the output from all the other F-35s, as well as from ground and satellite - it's all networked in), and think of the high-tech helmet that uses cameras and AR to let the pilot see 'through' the plane.
Second, the plane is more a node on a network than an independent platform. Think of those integrated sensors: Using them, a commander can deploy any other asset on the network against an enemy, alone or in combination - missiles from the ground or and electronic jamming from another plane, for example - it's not just the fight of the plane that happened to carry the sensor that detected the target. It's the difference between a standalone computer and a networked one.
Third, think of effect of range in naval technology: Ships used to pull up alongside each other and sailors would fight hand-to-hand. Then sufficiently effective cannon were developed and ships fought each other from miles away; anyone still using boarding parties was sunk before they could get close enough; cannon maxed out at maybe a couple of dozen miles on battleships. Then naval air power was developed, aircraft carriers and planes, and their range was several hundred miles; ships relying on cannon never even saw their foes, they were just targets for the planes and coffins for their personnel (this famously happened at the Battle of Midway). The same thing is happening with fighter planes: Nobody will get close enough for dogfights; they usually won't even see the other plane. Evaluating modern planes based on dogfighting is, in this sense, like evaluating aircraft carriers based on boarding parties or cannon.
[0] http://csbaonline.org/publications/2007/03/six-decades-of-gu...
[1] People sometimes are shocked by this idea, but that is the goal of combat: To massacre your enemy before they know you are there. It's not a sporting event; you absolutely don't want a fair fight.
Over the rest of your answer, you did a good job of summarizing what the F-35 was supposed to do. It was supposed to use stealth, technology and a ton of data to avoid having to get too close. Unfortunately, the actual plane is far from achieving any of these.
The F-35s much lauded sensors don't work particularly well. Things et even worse when you have a number of F-35s operating together and sharing data. Targets outright disappear and others appear twice. In testing, F-35 pilots have taken to shutting down sensors as they're simply better pilots with less information. The helmet is a particular clusterfuck and may be incurable. It presents so much information that it has been known to actually block targets from the pilots' view. One story of the F-35 in combat is that the cameras aren't good enough to ID targets so pilots have to close in on the target to get visual ID, then fly far enough away so that their air to air missiles would work. Even if they maintain stealth (which they have trouble doing because the F-35s use so many radar signals for targeting), having to close in, then fly away to shoot gives the enemy a great window to attack. And, with the F-35s handling at lower speeds, many 40 year old planes would fucking devastate it if given the chance.
I did go a bit too far with my first sentence, but what you say about the F-35's effectiveness is much different than what I read from experts, who generally seem to see it as a very complex system, maturing, but with excellent potential.
In fairness, I stated my credentials (none) and cited someone with credentials. Do you have any, or is the above based on knowledge from anyone who does have them?
