Navaleye /
Not a Boffin - thanks for gen on CVF. Nice ship.
WEBF /
Jackonicko - of course STOVL JSF was the 'preferred' option that was why we bought it. But who preferred it and why. I can tell you for a fact that the equipment capability desk officers in MOD were gutted/felt betrayed/were infuriated by the decision to buy STOVL, which certainly was not the 'best' option, nor even the 'preferred' option in their view. There is no point in arguing over detailed stats and costings produced after the event and derived using assumptions about an equipment's performance, reliability and serviceability 20 years hence, especially when nothing of the like has ever been built before. By tweaking the number of accidents, incidents or failures per ten thousand flying hours, or how many hours pilots need to fly per month in order to stay current at air-defence as opposed to multi-role, or how many deck hands you need to work in so many shifts per day in order to run CV as opposed to STOVL ops etc. etc. etc. you can retrospectively justify any decision to procure any equipment, so think twice before meekly accepting the necessarily convincing arguments loyally trotted out in the wake of the decision to procure STOVL by the poor sods who had argued that we shouldn't. Yes, SMART procurement is all about trading perfomance against time and cost, but don't expect too much candour from the value for money merchants when it comes to explaining why they had to buy the slightly crappy version.
Was STOVL best vfm? Assuming that CV was more expensive than STOVL (don't assume that it was - lies, damn lies and stats etc.) the SMART question is: was the increased performance (range, payload, manouverability, survivability etc.) worth the increased cost and if so, could we/should we have afforded it. If the answer to both questions is yes (Customer 1 thought so) - then why didn't HMG buy it? Workshare/ industrial lobbying? Maybe a smatter of inter-service politicking? Maybe we thought that we'd have more influence in the programme if we bought STOVL rather than CV: the theory being that the USN were always going to get JSF, but that there was some doubt about the USMC, who were very keen for the UK to buy STOVL because they knew that in any budgetry pinch, the USAF/DOD would agressively protect F-22 and that the principle savings would come from the F-35, in which they were the junior partner . . . and the only one buying a limited edition, reduced range/payload weapons system, whose relatively poor performance didn't significantly detract from its suitability for use in the littoral, and which would justify the continued existence of an independent fleet of USMC aircraft carriers. Maybe the US preferred that we buy STOVL - UK expertise, longer production runs of that variant, economies of scale etc. and offered us more tech exchange or a sweeter deal.
Maybe we're getting uneccessarily strung out on trying to understand the decision to procure STOVL from a capability perspective. Maybe capability wasn't a consideratiuon. Some doctrine junkie rather smugly mentioned 'effects' earlier on this thread (its not about platforms it's about effects - yawn). Well, maybe they're right. . . but if you're looking for an effects based argument as to why we bought STOVL rather than C-Variant JSF, then don't waste your time on the military line of operation.
PowerGen