What if Admiral King became CNO instead of Stark 39.

He will suffer the same fate as Harold Rainsford Stark, facing a Court of Inquiry over his actions leading up to Pearl Harbor.

Stark was not subjected to any legal action whatsover, since this would have caused certain "unpleasant problems and decisions" created and made by FDR, himself, to necessarily come to light at Stark's much deserved court martial, no matter how much it would have been just to send "Betty" Stark to the rockpile for his assorted crimes. I, also, do not blame FDR for these decisions and problems, because he received bad advice, and had a secretary of the Navy, prior to Frank Knox, who was criminally idiotic, who contributed to FDR's problems.  Nevertheless, Roosevelt, as president,  would have taken mortal political damage from his political enemies, because it happened on his watch.  I will develop this case in a bit.      
Stark's crimes are many and varied^1. However, as these crimes are far too numerous to describe here, in detail, let me instead hit the three main points where he failed as a naval officer:   
a. He was a battleship oriented admiral, who failed to keep apprised of the ongoing technological, operational and tactical changes that influenced the essential applicable means of naval warfare, with the airplane, submarine and destroyer as launch platforms and the bomb, torpedo / missile and MINE as effectors.    
b. He bought into the false dogma of Julian Corbett, of a navy as an adjunct to land warfare. The British naval amateur, who was a Churchill favorite in WWI, espoused that skewed theory, and ignored the more applicable Mahanic core principles of commerce and international trade, which implied control of such traffic through the air and upon the sea and the use and denial military principles, so involved, which predicated the creations of navies and air forces in the first place as independent of land warfare instruments to ensure that use for your nation and its denial to others of that air and sea.
c. Worst of all, Stark was a man of no character: being a racist, a moral coward, a man of no core principles, save to say and do whatever that he, Stark, thinks would advance his career, for he was what we now call a BETA human being.  
   
^1. Stark's main crimes were flavored by his willing subserviance to foreign interests, as opposed to those interests, as determined by the United States government.   

============================================================

If King comes aboard as CNO Actual in 1939, he is confronted on Day One with the European War. His first big policy and operations challenge and opportunity to change things for the better; is the Vinson-Walsh Act of 19 July 1940 (Two Ocean Navy Bill.). Prior to that act, there is very little, in an alternate history as hypothesized above, that he can structurally do to change the fleet composition, because of six years of inattention, neglect and gross stupidity by this man; and by the prior CNOs and Bureau Chiefs that that bigotted Wilsonian Unreconstructed Confederate person championed and recommended. In the alternate history, Swanson has saddled King with a defective fleet of the following physical characteristics:

1. -built around a core of battleships with a tactical speed of 16 knots or 8.23 m/s designed to refight the Battle of Jutland.
2. -with an aviation force at least 5 years behind the best British and German land-based aviation of 1939, and with a Bu-Air infested and screwed up by this man, who did not understand how out-of-date American naval aviation actually was.
3. -with defective effectors all across the national inventory, and by this I mean: mines, torpedoes, bombs, depth charges, and anything and everything that guns shot out of a gun barrel. It was all materially not sufficiently tested, not validated and not weapon proofed to what would pass modern muster. None of it was. It was not just a mere torpedo crisis. This was the colossal failing of Bu-Ord across the gambit. The criminals responsible for this failure to weapon proof (Bu-Ord Actuals), were:
Rear Admiral William D. Leahy, 1927–1931
Rear Admiral Edgar B. Larimer, 1931–1934
Rear Admiral Harold Rainsford Stark, 1934–1937      
Rear Admiral William R. Furlong, 1937–1941

The principle criminal was Stark, since he rubberstamped as ready, most of the defective ordnance, as proofed and lied to Congress that it had matured and been tested while he was Bu-Ord Actual. Furlong failed to catch the failures in due diligence on his watch.  He, Furlong. has been falsely blamed for most of what was Stark's fault. Either way, you look at it, King was on the sea command and personnal admin tracks, so he had no way of knowing how bad the overall general  material condition of the fleet was, aside from his personal stints of sea duty, where he, King, understood and experienced the material conditions of the aircraft carriers and of submarines, which he could and did start to remedy when he became CNO in the real history in March-April 1942.              

Note the bolded-blue? How was King, LantFleet Actual, supposed to fix the Battle of the Atlantic mistakes, when his BOSS, Harold Stark CNO Actual, took away his destroyers and oil tankers and gave them to the BRITISH, who criminally wasted them?    

But to that chance of 19 July 1940 to imprimatur the USN for the coming war, you must ask: how much lead time does that give King to fix the discovered gross material shortcomings: assuming he is told the true condition of the effectors and the shortages and defects in launch platforms? What can King do from 1939 to 1942 with the garbage he has in 1939? 

Assuming Furlong tells King the truth (and is court martialed and replaced by a better man.), and that Rear Admiral Alexander H. Van Keuren, C and R Actual, coughs up the truth about the ships (and is also court martialed.), then King could stand down the fleet and test everything. You can do a LOT in a year, provided you live fire the ordnance and are willing to shoot at live targets. There is a chance that you can fix the artillery and remedy the defective torpedoes. There is not an expletive deleted you can do about the too slow battleships, or the tanker or destroyer shortages and the obsolete aircraft, except mark up priorities in the navy construction program for the ships and planes you need. 

It will take five years to design new torpedoes, and new shells and mines.  You frankly are stuck with the badly-designed and made ordnance you have. You have to at least make those pieces of junk work.  That much can be done. It was done by 1944, but if you start by 1939, you could have been ready by the end of 1941 or early 1942.  
 
The new shipborne naval aircraft in the pipeline, are due in 1942-1943, and there is nothing you can do about that problem, except get rid of John Tower who screwed up the Sea Wolf, delayed the Avenger and bollixed up the Wildcat. Replace him and you might bring those planes into service about a half year earlier than historical. What King CAN immediately do is latch onto land-based aircraft and create anti-ship strike units as the Italians and the Japanese have. Even if it is the B-18 Bolo for now, borrowed from the army and navalized; a lousy land-based anti-ship bomber is better than NO land-based anti-ship bomber.  

As for the Two Ocean Navy Bill, a program of escort aircraft carriers and very long range maritime patrol planes, more destroyers and escorts, more submarines and light AAA cruisers and MORE TANKERS are more important than Kongo Killer Iowas and Montana class battleships. The point is to get the right kinds of hulls in the water fast, and build a fleet to handle the worst possible naval situation, the one in which the Royal Navy totally screws up the Mediterranean and in the North Atlantic and in the Indian Ocean.     
     
If you are Admiral King, then that is exactly what you expect. But he was NOT in a position in 1940 to do anything about it. In 1942, he was and he did. The Montanas were axed and destroyers and submarines and tankers became the highest priorities. Aircraft carriers as escorts (CVEs) were FDR's idea and King missed that one.  Nobody is perfect, you know?   

=====================================================

Strategy, Operational Art, Means and Tactics.

In the United States, the president sets the strategy, the congress supplies the means and the military professionsla have to use the means supplied to undertake the national strategy. FDR, in 1939, was a naval overestimator, who thought the USN could deliver far more than it could. He set up a Teddy Roosevelt "BIG STICK" naval strategy based upon that belief, wherein he thought that the navy could Neutrality Patrol the Germans away from the Western Atlantic and that PacFleet (Called the US Fleet or the Battle Force) could be projected forward to scare the Japanese into quietude. He was prudent enough to ask his fleet commanders if it was possible to do such a thing. There was no such thing as Lantfleet until January 1941, until King BUILT it as LantFleet Actual out of the putative Scouting Force; so King was in no position to advise FDR in 1939 or even up until he became CNO as until then it was the CINCUS and Stark as CNO who did the navy's talking to the president as the military professionals. The actual monkeys in the barrel, as CINCUS Actual, were:

ADM Claude C. Bloch 1938–6 January 1940  He advised FDR not to "power project", but Stark overruled him.  
ADM James O. Richardson 6 January 1940 – January 5, 1941 He not only said; "no" but "expletive deleted no" and FDR fired him, when Stark backstabbed him.   
ADM Husband Kimmel 5 January 1941 – December 1941 You know what happened to him?       

And prior to July 1940 after France was defeated and it was apparent even to the nitwits in Congress that maybe the British were not everything that Stark and Marshall told them the British were, the MEANS to implement the national strategy was not to be had. 

That still goes to FDR, who believed what Stark told him; "The Navy can do it." 

Sometimes, you have to be an ADM Richardson. And even then it does no good.  

It took a combination of Pearl Harbor and Drumbeat to finish off Stark by March 1942. FDR, by then, knew he was politically exposed for several colossal misjudgements, especially swallowing whole the expletive deleted Plan Dog memo which was Stark's incredibly stupid substitute for current Rainbow 3 which was the Eisenhower Marshal workup of 1940. 

=======================================================

The British problem. They lied to the United States about tonnage losses. 

King, in 1939 would (and did in 1942), tell Roosevelt bluntly that while the Battle of the Atlantic situation was bad, it was not anywhere as bad as the British claimed. The allies could weather it in a building race, by building more freighters than the Germans could sink, when and until the Allies (namely America) could finally build enough escorts and deploy enough maritime naval aviation to defeat the U-boat menace for the buildup in the British islands *(By 1944 was King's estimate.). It was in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean where the naval crises was in 1942. Unless the Japanese naval offensives were stopped at sea, the oceanic supply lines of the British Desert Army and the Russian Red Army, in their wars against the Germans, would be cut; and therein lay naval defeat and land defeat for the allies and the loss of the world war. 

The Royal Navy had so fouled up the global naval situation in 1942, that the Pacific was now by default an all American show and the Indian Ocean after the Japanese trounced the British there, was almost gone.

The only place where the RN put up any kind of a decent fight for sea control was in the Mediterranean and they could not even close the deal there until after the Japanese were so beaten that an Italian / Japanese juncture was rendered impossible. That was what the attacks on Sri Lanka and the Italian raid on Alexandria was all about. To set up the conditions for such an eventual linkup.  

King stopped that. How?

He stripped the Lantfleet and sent Nimitz everything in the cupboard that he had. This caused the British to HOWL that he had sacrificed the Battle of the Atlantic.  Then happened Coral Sea, Midway and Guadalcanal.  It was a BITTER 1942 and 1943 for the Americans. NOT the British who claimed the American shipping that was sacrificed off our Atlantic seaboard so we could stop the Japanese, was somehow theirs; as if our hulls were somehow supposed to be part oi their shipping tonnage. It was the Americans who died at both ends of the world ocean to achieve that victory.^2

That incidentally was what won the global naval war by mid 1943 when the U-boat was also defeated on King's schedule. That is why KING is the great allied admiral and why the British criticize him.  

^2 Cunningham won Matapan and that was a famous victory, but by then it was a meaningless victory because the Italians still managed in December 1941 to bollix and neuter the British Mediterranean fleet with their Alexandria UDT Raid. Somerville, next in the Indian Ocean was Nagumo trounced in April 1942, effectively ceding the Indian Ocean to the Japanese whenever and if they wanted it. Cunningham that April would have been powerless to prevent such a event from happening, as such also was the case for Somerville who cowered off Kenya, wondering just what he was supposed to do if and when Nagumo came for him.  

Except that the most decisive naval battle of WWII happened (Coral Sea) to prevent that from happening and then the Japanese foolishly followed that defeat up with Midway where PacFleet finished the job to neuter the IJN offensive punch. Once parity was achieved and attrition set in at Guadalcanal, then King could turn his attention to the Germans. They, the Germans, did not last long at sea, either, did they? 

What about Pedestal? (August 1942.)

Arguably it saved Malta, but then consider something not many naval historians will admit? The bulk of Sherman tanks that reached the Desert Army sailed AROUND Africa, not through the Mediterranean. By November 1942 (Torch), the situation was rendered such as Malta became functionally much less important. Until then, Malta might have served an important interdiction role. It can be argued that Pedestal was indeed the RN's finest WWII moment for it was literally the last Axis chance for a naval stalemate in the Mediterranean, as if Malta fell, it would be much harder to raid the Italian sea lines of communication and would take another half year of land warfare to clear the Axis out of North Africa. But Pedestal, navally, was not as VITAL in the way Coral Sea and Midway were.