U.S. Airpower Debate Opened By NGAD Hiatus Nears Resolution

A paralyzing, monthslong debate over the future of the U.S. Air Force’s next fighter is about to enter an intense, final phase, and it will have deep implications for the future of airpower and the U.S. defense industrial base.

Service leaders came within days of awarding a contract for the Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program last June. An engineering and manufacturing development phase worth more than $20 billion awaited, requiring only the stroke of a pen. It was a moment a decade in the making, following a series of studies, demonstrators and an exhaustive source selection process. Anticipating victory, Boeing had broken ground on a 979,000-ft.² final assembly building and a 94,550-ft.² radar cross-section test site in St. Louis.

• The NGAD program is nearing nine months of pause
• Powerful voices are calling for radical change
• The Air Force is considering a wide array of new approaches to air superiority

But then the Air Force blinked. Despite billions already spent on technology maturity and risk-reduction work for the NGAD airframe and a new form of adaptive turbofan propulsion, Air Force leaders put the program on hold.

The hiatus exposed a new wave of skepticism that had grown around the requirements within some corners of the Air Force. Practical questions arose about the wisdom of operating warplanes several times more expensive than a Lockheed Martin F-35 from vulnerable forward bases, especially in the vast Indo-Pacific region. Vague warnings surfaced that developments in adversary air defenses posed new, existential threats to even the most advanced U.S. fighters. Having reviewed the best and final offers from Boeing and Lockheed, Air Force leaders blanched at the remaining costs to develop and field the successor to the Lockheed Martin F-22.

The months of internal reviews that followed came to a nuanced conclusion. Yes, the NGAD program’s family of systems still mattered, but it could wait while the Air Force sorted out other budget priorities.

“At the end of the day, the consensus of that group was largely that there is value in going ahead with this, and there are some industrial-base reasons to go ahead, but there are other priorities that we really need to fund first,” Frank Kendall, who was then still Air Force secretary, said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on Jan 13.

But the original concept of an advanced crewed fighter at the heart of the NGAD’s proposed capabilities may need to change. The requirements could be downgraded from an elite air superiority fighter—a worthy replacement for the mighty F-22, in other words—to an F-35-style, multirole aircraft, orchestrating long-range strikes from afar while managing autonomous Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) tasked with the most dangerous aspects of the mission.

“The alternatives to the F-22 replacement concept include something that looks more like an F-35 follow-on; something that’s much less expensive, something that’s a multirole aircraft—a multirole aircraft that is designed to be a manager of CCAs,” Kendall said. “And then there was another option we thought about, which is reliance more on long-range strike. It’s relatively inexpensive and probably would make some sense to do more that way.”

But the final decision is no longer in his hands. President Donald Trump nominated Troy Meink, a former Boeing KC-135 navigator and the current principal deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office, to be Kendall’s successor.

All options remain on the table as Meink waits for the Senate to schedule a confirmation hearing. In December, the Air Force extended contracts with Boeing and Lockheed to keep their design teams intact, allowing a new cohort of civilian leadership to resume the same delayed source selection process after a pause of eight months (and counting). But if he is confirmed, Meink will face a cacophony of proposals to make changes.

In the backdrop lurk widespread concerns about the state of the Air Force’s tactical aviation fleet and whether it has become too small, expensive and inflexible for future needs.

Powerful voices, led by key Trump advisor Elon Musk, are calling for a radical shift to an all-autonomous fleet. Musk’s ideas about the obsolescence of crewed fighters in modern combat predate his new role as director of the Department of Government Efficiency, an advisory body established by Trump. “The fighter jet era has passed,” he told a gathering of thousands of Air Force pilots attending the 2020 Air Warfare Symposium. “Drone warfare is where the future will be. It’s not that I want the future to be—it’s just, this is what the future will be.”

With a new mandate from Trump to shake up military spending and programs, Musk has elaborated on his skepticism about the future relevance of all crewed combat aircraft, expressing a strong preference for autonomous vehicles and long-range, high-speed weapons.

“Future wars are all about drones & hypersonic missiles,” Musk wrote on social media platform X on Nov. 26. “Fighter jets piloted by humans will be destroyed very quickly.”

His views appear radical but are only slightly beyond the limits of Kendall’s interest in autonomous systems.

“People have talked about not doing another crewed aircraft,” Kendall said at the CSIS. “I don’t think we’re quite there yet. I think that could be considered. We could just continue to rely on the F-35 and keep it going in the foreseeable future and focus on CCAs. I’m not quite ready to do that personally, but the next administration could take a look at that.”

The highest-ranking Air Force generals, meanwhile, also appear to be open to breaking from traditional notions of air superiority, favoring approaches designed to achieve affordable mass on the scale of World War II-size fleets with an architecture that accommodates change on a pace not seen since the early days of the jet age.

In September, Gen. James Slife, the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff, penned a little-noticed essay in Aether, an in-house academic journal. While noting that “stalwart technologies of traditional aircraft” remain relevant, Slife said  small uncrewed aircraft systems and a new class of cheap long-range munitions could reclaim World War II-style mass for future air campaigns.

“Now, with capabilities that traverse the trade space between platforms and munitions, affordable large-scale production runs are within our reach,” Slife wrote. “Mass is back. Let us imagine what we might do with it as airmen.”

The Air Force has new tools. The proposed CCA family seeks to deliver a diverse mix of platforms in the thousands to augment or replace crewed aircraft in modern combat. A new breed of affordable cruise missiles—typified by the competition for the Enterprise Test Vehicle—offer the possibility of completing long-range strikes at a fraction of the cost of current munitions.

The question now is whether a direct replacement for the F-22 still has a role in this new mix of capabilities.

In 2017, the answer to that question for the Air Force was a resounding “yes.” The Air Superiority 2030 Flight Plan—the product of a yearlong analysis led by then-Brig. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich—validated a requirement for a Penetrating Counter-Air (PCA) capability.

“While PCA capability will certainly have a role in targeting and engaging, it also has a significant role as a node in the network, providing data from its penetrating sensors to enable employment using either standoff or stand-in weapons,” Grynkewich wrote in the now eight-year-old Flight Plan.

At the time, the PCA represented a list of attributes to be acquired, not an aircraft, crewed or uncrewed. In a future air war, the Northrop Grumman B-21 would leverage its heavier munitions load to target an enemy’s airfields and key logistics nodes. The PCA capability, meanwhile, would support the bomber, not unlike how North American P-51s assisted Boeing B-17s on long-range bombing missions in Europe during World War II. In whatever form it would take, the PCA was envisioned as sweeping enemy fighters from the skies and suppressing or destroying air defenses on the ground.

The Air Force then launched an analysis of alternatives (AOA) in 2017, looking to translate the PCA capability into requirements for NGAD hardware within a year.

That is when the program was hit by the first of three lengthy delays. When Will Roper became assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics in 2018, he did not like the result of the AOA process for the NGAD program. The classified recommendations pushed for a solution that Roper regarded as too conventional. The former physics professor, missile defense architect and Strategic Capabilities Office founder had something more radical in mind.

In the waning months of the first Trump administration, Roper laid out an unorthodox vision for the future of the air superiority mission. Instead of buying a direct F-22 replacement intended to last for decades, he proposed a complete break from the traditional process. His Digital Century Series proposal called for buying multiple different platforms every two years and retiring them within 16 years. The goal was to keep the hardware as fresh and relevant as possible, allowing the platforms to take full advantage of new advances in software-driven capabilities.

But Roper’s job in government came to an end in January 2021 as President Joe Biden took office. Kendall entered office in August 2021 with a skeptical view of the Digital Century Series approach for the entire NGAD program, although a version of the overall concept lives on in the CCA acquisition strategy. He ordered the Air Force to launch a conventional acquisition process to field a straightforward F-22 replacement in the 2030s.

“The Air Force wrote requirements for an aircraft that is essentially an F-22 replacement,” Kendall said at the CSIS. “And for the last few years, that’s what we’ve been working on.”

The defense industry shared that vision a decade ago, producing renderings of advanced fighters invariably lacking vertical tails. To support the flying-wing B-21 on long-range missions in the Indo-Pacific, such aircraft would also likely be much larger than the F-22. The Air Force only confirmed one feature of the NGAD platform: The engine would feature the GE Aerospace A102 or Pratt & Whitney A103, introducing adaptive turbofans with fuel-efficient, variable-bypass streams.

In many ways, the Air Force’s original vision for the F-22 replacement is not unique. The U.S. Navy, for example, is close to selecting a crewed fighter to replace the Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet on carrier decks in the 2030s. The Air Force’s vision also is not dissimilar to the requirements that informed the design of the Franco-German-Spanish Future Combat Air System or the UK-Italian-Japanese Global Combat Air Program. The similarities even extend to potential adversaries. Two Chinese Air Force prototypes revealed on Dec. 26—the so-called J-36 and J-50—confirm Beijing’s pursuit of crewed next-generation fighters, which is likely part of a family of systems.

Hovering over the Air Force’s decision-making is the NGAD program’s cost. In 2019, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the price of the advanced fighter at up to $300 million each. Kendall has complained that the fighter would cost “several hundred million” dollars and “multiples of an F-35,” which today runs to $94 million each for the Air Force version.

“Maybe that was kind of a thought process that this was too expensive for us to actually produce in any numbers that would make a difference,” says John Venable, a senior fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

In Venable’s view, the choice is a false one. The B-21 bomber program proved the feasibility of using digital design and manufacturing tools to lower the final price of an advanced new warplane. And some of the same techniques can be adopted to lower the price of a next-generation fighter. For example, the initial version of the next-generation fighter could leverage the mission systems developed for the F-35 Block 4 rather than a new suite, Venable says. “You’re not talking about $300 million then,” he explains. “Now you’re talking about in the game of an F-35.”

For arguably the first time in its history, the Air Force appears to be willing to consider a wide array of new approaches to achieving air superiority. As Slife reminded us in his essay, much depends on  finding the correct solution for the NGAD program.

“Are we pursuing sixth-generation air superiority capabilities, or only a sixth-generation aircraft?” Slife asked. “Our force cannot responsibly bet that we will have the time and space to recover from getting this one wrong.”