The F35 was a Lockheed bureaucratic coup: they got buy in from the Marine Corps, which has very little organic technical prowess compared to the Air Force and N

The F35 was a Lockheed bureaucratic coup: they got buy in from the Marine Corps, which has very little organic technical prowess compared to the Air Force and Navy, by pitching the VSTOL version up front. Once they had buy-in from the Marines, DoD released a short-fused competition announcement, which gave the Boeing team very little lead time to produce a competent competitive airframe, the X-32, which looks like an obese guppy (1). As for airworthiness, it should be noted Lockheed has no, no commercial airframe business. Boeing's commercial business exceeds all military programs in production scale. Observers of the competition generally agreed (1) Boeing could have produced better airframes given a more reasonable timeframe, (2) separate airframes (as Boeing proposed and eventually happened in the F35 anyway) would provide better performance per dollar. As for the Zumwalt, I'll just leave Robert Work's paper (2) as an exercise for the reader. The Ford is too big to say much of anything about "the Ford". Carriers are huge investments. On investment scale, it's equivalent to building a city from scratch. If you haven't been on one, you probably can't wrap your head around the scale of the thing. Nuclear reactors, an airport, 5-6000 people, enough munitions to level a small city. And it's own flotilla of warships. (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Strike_Fighter_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Strike_Fighter_program (2) http://awin.aviationweek.com/Portals/AWeek/Ares/work%20white%20paper.PDF http://awin.aviationweek.com/Portals/AWeek/Ares/work%20white...