Hot air and grandstanding. BAE has got a serious chunk of the F-35 development work with it’s US subsidiaries. They’re not about to drop out even if the UK MoD wanted to. This is the biggest defense spending program in the world for the next decade possibly longer.

If they want to play divide and conquer politics by getting the the British government to lobby the Pentagon for a UK production line, that’s fine. Just remember, it’s for BAEs benefit not the UKs.

I don’t think that any of us should forget that they happen to get a bigger chunk of the work and profits if they succeed in getting the designs and a UK production line setup.

I would turn off the blinking in the left hand nav.

If Great Britain had purchased a new generation of big carriers in the 1960s (CVA-01 et al) and (assuming it still took place) by the time of the Falklands war, the RN had replaced its Phantoms with Tomcats, what, in addition to defendng the Task Force from Exocet-armed fighter-bombers, do you think it would have been doing? It would have been used to sweep the skies of the Argentine Airforce and Naval Air Service prior to the landing of British troops to liberate the islands. In other words, air superiority.

The weather in the South Atlantic is particularly bad. Many times the RN Harriers were operating under conditions which would have prevented flight operations on a USN style super carrier. I understand conditions were often under the USN 200 ft cloud base and 880 yards visibility standards for aircraft recovery.

I don’t think that USAF adoption of the F-14 was ever a real possibility. After accepting USN aircraft in the form of the A-7 and F-4 in the 60s, I think they really wanted an aircraft that they could truly call their own.

B-17E or later would be nice. Grumman Tigercat wouldn’t be bad. A Kawasaki Ki-100 would be cool.

But I think, I’d really like a Kawanishi N1K2- Shinden-Kai

USN hands down.

Grumman Tigercat and the waist position on a B-17

I doubt that Japan will build her next fighter. There are very serious budgetary and economic problems that make that very difficult.

I’d say that they go with an F/A-22. The per unit costs are calculated with the R&D costs factored in, but I think that it’s entirely possible for Japan to negotiate a deal that is based more on cost plus a percentage profit for Lockheed.

I’m sure that China would squeal if Japan got anything that was carrier capable, even if they never build such a ship.

Iraq is a war with no forseeable end in sight. As long as it continues, program like the F/A-22 will continue to be in danger. I give zere chance of an FB-22 in this budgetary environment. In the next decade the baby boomers will be well on their way to collecting Social Security and that’s a budgetary drain that no politician will trade off for more guns, bombs, or F/A-22s

I wouldn’t wager on the viability of the Virginia class nuclear attack subs either.