“Damn good thing this didn’t happen in the run up to world war 2.(in some limited cases it did)A decade behind? That’s unreal.”
Actually, I think the Navy was caught at least a generation behind by the Zero and other Japanese long range planes. We caught up fast, but at that time America had something like 35% of the world’s industrial capacity and a huge, skilled workforce. Today we produce software and five dollar coffee. The workforce either can’t, won’t or lives nicely on welfare. We aren’t the same country we were and the technology is leaping ahead. We won’t be beaten on quantity, but we may end up ceding local areas like those around China simply because the cost of taking or defending them will be too much for the public to bear.
The world will be a darker, more dangerous place because America has slipped from its preeminent status.
It wasn’t so much being a generation behind as having made different design tradeoffs.
The Zero is alleged to have been based on the stolen designs for the Hughes Racer. Whether that’s true or not is debatable, but what isn’t is that the Zero was very much a racing design that traded weight, stability and survivability for raw performance. It wasn’t nearly as rugged as the F4F, lacked self sealing fuel tanks and was unstable in a dive.
So long as the Wildcat didn’t get into a climbing, turning fight with a Zero, it was the better plane in a dogfight. Once the Wildcat pilots figured out that Zeros died pretty easily if you dived into them, or ganged up on them (Thatch Weave) the F4F racked up a net positive kill ratio.