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Ok folks, lets have a little fun with this idea. Let's say that Uncle Sam, who we all know never makes any mistakes or bad decisions, decides, in his infinite wisdom, too up and trash all 7 ships of the USS Iwo Jima class, just after the 5th unit of the Tarawa class is commissioned, so let's call that June 1st, 1980.

Please follow the links to both these classes, as well as the link to the Wiki on the Falkland War, so that all posts here are informed and on the same sheet of music.

Let us keep the discussion away from the US decision to DX this ship class years earlier than historically, and also away from anything along the lines of debunking the goal of this thread, which is to have the RN in possession all 7 of these ships, with at least two of them fully operational and capable of using to their fullest extent, at least a few months before the war begins.

The idea here is to explore just what a difference the 7 ships of this class would have had on this conflict, had the US sold them to the UK for scrapping on/by June 1st, 1980. If the UK/RN gets these ships on that date, can they have at least two of them still untouched, and able to be brought into service? Could the UK/RN have decided to keep/use a couple of these ships, while starting to scrap the others?

Have fun with this, and let me know what would have happened...
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