Is There a Ski-Jump in the U.S. Navy’s Future?
-”Will a successful development of the F-35B short take-off and landing (STOVL) Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) variant force small aircraft carriers on the U.S. Navy? This is a fair question with a debtor U.S. federal budget in turmoil from the global economic meltdown.”-
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SPL, and 
RSF are discussing. 
RSF 11:50 pm on July 5, 2009 Permalink |
Considering the Chinese development of ASBM’s designed to kill the American Super Carriers, smaller carriers with stealth features and STOVL fighters could offer advantages.
SPL 8:32 am on July 6, 2009 Permalink |
Unless you build tens of “baby carriers”, they never could compete with the CVNs as power projection platforms (the main role of a carrier).
F-35B is less capable both in performance and weapons load (and has less combat radius, 500 vs. 650 nm) than the F-35C, and the “baby carrier” could not operate the future Navy UCAS.
In 2025… Do you prefer to have a CVN with 4 fighter squadrons (36 F-35C and 12 N-UCAS) or 4 “baby carriers” with 12 F-35B each? At the end, you spend nearly the same money and you got a less capable navy.
One more thing: if the Chinese ASBM works as the people say, the best is to mantain any major surface combatant away from the Chinese coast. At least until you have direct energy weapons or something to counter the threat properly…