[sailfast]

While you might be right, is it not also possible that they delivered some key capabilities that were unique (autonomous carrier landing!?) to reach the strike objective, realized it wouldn't meet all of them so pivoted to ISR (of which I recall there being a shortage of assets so maybe more demand with other strike programs going on in 2012?) then looked to the tanker mission after realizing there were other things that it maybe couldn't do as well as other platforms for the ISR purpose?

In startup language you might say the team "pivoted"?

I'm not saying that's what happened here as bureaucracy often causes these nightmares, but it's possible there were a lot of good intentions / approaches at play as well.