Puss,

 

I am quite aware of the availability issues. For deployments in places like the Solomons and Bouganville, which are likely to be the scale for most such missions at short notice, we would only need one ship anyway. For larger deployments like Timor, if we hadn't had sufficient warning to get all the ships ready we would either work cooperatively with allies or we would just wait until the extra ships were ready to deploy.

 

In the meantime there is likely to be the usual diplomatic manouvering and the like, so it isn't like we are going to haved to rush the Army their straight away anyway. That is obviously why they are comfortable purchasing only one sealift ship to ferry troops and material from the AO while the amphibs operate as seabases. They aren't expecting to have to do such a large operation independently at very short notice.

 

As for your second comment, yes, I think it is unlikly that the Government will be sufficiently visionary to purchase F-35B's for these ships as well. It is more likely that we will have a situation arise in 2020 or 2025 when we need them to successfully undertake an operation, but have to run cap in hands to the American's for help because we have failed to provide for ourselves. You never know, they might have sufficiently conflicting interests to just say no.

 

However, if people don't make a noise about it the chance of us getting them falls from remote to zero, so people like the Navy League are doing the right thing by raising it. They only need to convince one defence minister and it becomes reality. Boeing managed to do it with the Super Hornets and nobody saw that coming either, so I wouldn't be so c0ck-sure of myself if I were you ...