Does anyone actually know, not Peter Luff, Minister of State for Defence Equipment
The honest answer is we don’t know. The Americans are not reducing the total numbers of JSF but changing the profile of those purchases. Other partner nations are indicating they are going to reduce their actual off take. This is likely to have implications for JSF prices particularly in the early stages which is when this country intends to procure its (fighters).
Something else we don’t know is the cost and operational implications of the switch to CATOBAR beyond an estimate of just shy of a billion pounds.
Or
How we are going to turn a conventional carrier into the flexible Carrier Enabled Power Projection
Construction is going well and the training and cooperation agreements with the US and French navies seem to be equally on track but project CVF/JCA still has a great deal of risk and uncertainty that has still to be resolved.