Big decisions coming for the Air Force’s next-gen aircraft platforms

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — The Air Force is currently taking a more calculated approach to planning, developing and buying next-generation platforms — putting some of the service’s future aircraft programs in limbo as it looks for more clarity over the next few months.

During AFA’s Air, Space and Cyber conference last week, Air Force leadership doubled-down on its intent to field next-gen capabilities, including a sixth-generation fighter jet and bomber, accompanying loyal wingman drones and a modern tanker. After months of uncertainty and conflicting public statements, the service acknowledged that it’s taking a number of external factors into consideration as it reevaluates its plans.

But while nothing is currently set in stone, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall emphasized during his keynote speech at the conference that the service will have “simultaneous and well-supported answers” about its future aircraft programs in the coming months.

“We are looking at what we need in order to achieve air superiority in a manner consistent with the increased threat, the changing character of war in the most cost- and combat-effective way,” Kendall said.

NGAD paused

Earlier this year, Air Force leadership began suggesting it was having second thoughts on its plans to acquire a a new stealth fighter jet — known as the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) platform. 

Kendall confirmed to reporters at the AFA conference that the service has halted the selection process for NGAD in order to reexamine the Air Force’s current design concept and ensure the platform is right for future threat, budget and technology environments.

The aircraft was initially designed to replace the F-22 Raptor fighter jet, and is envisioned as a long-range crewed platform equipped with advanced capabilities that can operate in highly contested environments. Kendall said NGAD’s current design as an F-22 replacement is several years old, and a number of new factors have come into play since it was first developed.

The pause isn’t expected to last more than a few months, he added.

Kendall has tapped a team of advisors led by his special assistant, Tim Grayson, to oversee the NGAD platform’s reevaluation in a context that considers emerging technologies and the service’s other future aircraft.

One point of consideration is the Air Force’s plans to conduct more disaggregated forms of air superiority, which is both the main mission for the F-22 and the intended one for the NGAD system.

During a panel at the conference, Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Jim Slife noted that in the past, the service would design a single platform with specific requirements and capabilities — such as size, range and thrust — so that it could execute a specific mission set, such as air superiority.

“We’ve gotten to a point now where our systems-level integration, we have the ability to disaggregate these capabilities and look at air superiority more broadly than just, ‘Hey, we have to build a platform to do a thing,’” Slife said.

The Air Force is already moving down a path of proliferating its capabilities more broadly on the battlefield, especially with its in-the-works drones known as collaborative combat aircraft (CCA). However, the concept “puts into question the design concept that we’ve been working on” for the NGAD platform, Kendall said. 

“It’s a fairly mature design concept, and … it’s an F-22 replacement. You can make some inferences from that,” he added. “The CCAs are about air superiority first and foremost. As we go forward, I expect there’ll be a strike aspect of CCAs as well, but initially we’re focused on air superiority and how to use the CCAs in conjunction with a crewed aircraft to achieve air superiority.”

Both the NGAD platform and CCAs are considered part of the next-generation air dominance family of systems, and thus closely connected during their respective development processes. The Air Force planned to have the NGAD aircraft and its fifth-generation fighters available to fly alongside the loyal wingman drones as a way to augment and extend capabilities of manned platforms.

According to Kendall, how much the Air Force can harness autonomy for both its fighter jet and CCA drones is part of the larger NGAD evaluation.

“We’re looking at a range of alternatives, and crewed versus uncrewed is one of the things we’re thinking about. … I believe that we’re probably going to do one more version of a crewed, more traditional aircraft. I don’t know exactly what that aircraft will look like yet,” Kendall said. “It’s design to make it able to control CCAs effectively and fight with CCAs — I think is a question mark. Whether there’ll be variants that might be crewed or uncrewed is another question mark.”

Kendall also emphasized that once fielded by the 2030s, armed CCAs will have to be under strict oversight by the manned fighters operating them — meaning they will require line-of-sight communications.

“We’re not going to have aircraft going out and doing engagements uncontrolled. So the default, if they lose communications, would be for them to return to base, which takes them out of the fight,” he continued. “So we don’t want that to happen. And when they do engagements, we want them under tight control.”

At the same time, the Air Force is trying to wrangle in the unit cost of the NGAD platform so that the service can field the aircraft in high-enough numbers to deter adversaries. For Kendall, an ideal price point for NGAD would be around that for the F-35 Lightning II fighter jet.

“I’d like to go lower, though,” he said. “Once you start integrating CCAs and transferring some mission equipment and capabilities functions to the CCAs, then you can talk about a different concept, potentially, for the crewed fighter that’s controlling them. So there’s a real range in there.”

Original estimates for the sixth-gen aircraft were around $300 million per plane, about three-times as much as what an F-35 costs today. Air Force acquisition chief Andrew Hunter later told reporters during a roundtable at the conference the service is looking to create a more affordable NGAD design concept, noting it may not come at the cost of an F-35 in the end.

As for what the intended output of the NGAD pause will be, such as a new request for information (RFI) or request for proposals (RFP), Hunter said that depends on what answers the Air Force finds in its analysis.

“There’s different possible points of optimization. If those points are very close to where we already are, there may not need to be a huge change in our approach. If they are not close, there will have to be a significant change to our approach,” he said.

Next-gen tanker and acquisition

As the Air Force mulls over NGAD, it’s also moving forward on another future aircraft program known as the Next Generation Air-refueling System (NGAS), while also testing out a new acquisition model that focuses on mission systems separately from the platforms themselves.

NGAS is a tanker that’s supposed to be designed to refuel other aircraft in more contested environments than today’s systems can. The service recently released an RFI for the platform’s mission systems as a way to establish a vendor pool for the program early, while also giving industry an early opportunity to help inform the Air Force’s requirements formation process, Hunter said.

“It’s not, ‘Hey, we’re going to pick one of you to be in charge of something for the next several decades.’ It’s about creating a pool of talent, if you will, a pool of industry capability that we will continuously access and continuously work with over time to achieve the objectives of delivering a capability, delivering a system,” Hunter said during a panel discussion at the AFA conference.

Focusing on mission systems first rather than the NGAS airframe was another intentional move by the Air Force, he later told reporters. The service is trying to pivot away from decades-old acquisition strategies where a single prime contractor is responsible for nearly every part of an aircraft program.

Instead, the department wants to buy aircraft mission systems separately moving forward as part of what Hunter referred to as the “next-generation acquisition model.”

One element of the new strategy includes engaging with industry early on in the process, while another “is having direct relationships, where it makes sense and where we can, with our mission system providers,” Hunter said. “The reason why is, your mission systems have to integrate across a broad swath of our force in order to accomplish the missions that we have to do, the complex mission threads that go into high-intensity conflict with a peer competitor.”

Another RFI for the NGAS airframe will come after the Air Force finishes conducting an analysis of alternatives (AOA) for the platform by the end of 2024, which will give insights into what its future aerial refueling needs will be and how quickly the new system can be developed.

The analysis will also inform the Air Force’s plans to purchase an interim tanker that will help bridge the gap between the service’s current fleet of air refueling platforms and the future NGAS, which is expected to be fielded in the mid-2030s, Hunter said.

Speaking to reporters during a roundtable at the AFA conference, head of U.S. Transportation Command Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost emphasized the importance of fielding NGAS as quickly as possible to prepare for future conflicts.

She noted that initial insights into the AOA are not surprising, and cover how the tanker will fly in contested environments, the need for low visibility, and concepts of operations for refueling both manned and unmanned platforms.

“I’m hoping that as NGAS AOA comes out and we are able to expose all those technologies, that no matter the platform, I can start getting those technologies as soon as possible,” Van Ovost said.