First, having taken some time off to cool down, a considered response to Evalu8r:
ENOUGH WITH
ING GUADALCANAL, ALREADY!
At the time of the "Navy bug-out", the Navy had built a total of eight carriers since CV-1 Langley in
1922 and three had been sunk, leaving five for two oceanic wars. Carriers had been shown to be both lethal and vulnerable (see Midway) and two more CVs - the brand new
Wasp and
Hornet - would be sunk in the months after Guadalcanal.
Only two new fleet carriers (
Essex and
Yorktown) were commissioned and operational in the 12 months after Guadalcanal, along with a few much less capable CVLs.
The US Navy Aircraft Carriers List
The US could not afford to play attrition warfare with CVs. Nevertheless, Marine mythology has continued to depict Guadalcanal as the betrayal of the brave Marines by the milquetoast Navy. Rubbish.
GK - Congress did, eventually, legislate a single JSF program, true enough. However. the "Congress made me do it" excuse still does not apply. The notion that one basic design could cover CV, CTOL and STOVL emerged from industry and DARPA studies and was adopted by the Aspin/Perry DoD as a way to plan for TacAir recapitalization, punt the major costs into the lap of the 2000 election winner, and force industry to consolidate.
Trifecta? They damn well did and the rest of us too.
It's very true that a standalone Harrier replacement would have been hard to get funded. An RN-USMC ASTOVL-only program might have worked, but the US threw a huge spanner in the works in the late 1980s by driving towards stealth, which not only drove weight up but for some time froze cooperation.
Engines: Thanks as usual. Just a few points:
The fuselage is not short, it's just really, really broad, under the wing. It's effective wing area is actually very large.
So why does the F-35C need almost 40 per cent more gross area than the Super Hornet (670 vs 500 ft2)? Seems to me that the projected wing area over the body is not as efficient or effective than the bits sticking out of the side.
Where the LM team did come unstuck was in not having the right weight estimation tools to cope with an airframe that had large holes and bays in it. On top of that, some of the detailed structural design was, well, uninspired to say the least.
I would add that they came unstuck on production cost estimation as well, see this:
Root Cause Analyses of Nunn-McCurdy Breaches, Volume 1: <em>Zumwalt</em>-Class Destroyer, Joint Strike Fighter, Longbow Apache, and Wideband Global Satellite | RAND
I still think that the single engine was more driven by STOVL than affordability - after all, JSF or SSF/ASTOVL before it was never envisaged as F-16-sized. It started as F-18 Classic and grew to F-18 Super.
USMC F-35B CONOPS do envisage forward strips, I think the strip length is 1200 ft. (Could be 1500, not sure).
I have never seen a KPP for land-based STO. However, as a practical matter the Marines never talk these days about less than 3,000 feet (it was 4,000 feet in their latest talking points to Congress). I suspect that has to do with getting KC-130s in and out.