Air Force is unsure of what the NGAD should do

U.S. military planners and strategists constantly think of how to prevail in a potential fight with a near-peer adversary, such as China and Russia. A main aspect of these calculations is air power as controling the skies gives you a greater chance of success.

And when it comes to air superiority, the Air Force believed it had found the solution in the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program. The NGAD has been in the works for just over a decade now. Its goal is to produce a family of manned and unmanned aircraft that would ensure America’s supremacy in the skies for decades to come.

Currently, the NGAD program is paused. The Air Force halted a planned contract award for the NGAD in order to reevaluate the specific requirements and skill sets it is looking to get out of a sixth-generation fighter jet.
To begin with, the NGAD fighter jet is intended to replace the ageing – but extremely capable – F-22 Raptor stealth fighter jet in its air superiority mission.

Introduced in 2005, the F-22 Raptor is an air superiority aircraft, the first stealth fighter jet to enter operational service. Although the Pentagon had initially planned for 750 F-22s, it ended up purchasing only 186 aircraft (Lockheed Martin shifted its production lines to support the emerging F-35 Lightning II). Today, only a fraction of the number remains operational.

Although the Air Force has been investing more in the stealth fighter jet, updating its sensors and payload capabilities, the F-22 remains a 20-year-old aircraft. The threats of today and tomorrow require newer and more advanced solutions and that is where the NGAD comes into play.

Related: Why America’s new NGAD fighter could be a bargain, even at $300 million each

The NGAD fighter was initially meant as a replacement for the F-22. Here, F-22 Raptors fly in formation. (U.S. Air Force photo)

Yet, now the Air Force is unsure about the specific capabilities it wants from the aircraft. In September, the Air Force Vice Chief of Staff General James C. Slife suggested that there was a disagreement within the service about the NGAD requirements. He indicated that the question of how to achieve air superiority in a contested, near-peer operational environment isn’t necessarily the same as how to build a sixth-generation fighter jet.

The senior Air Force officer essentially said the service doesn’t necessarily need a sixth-generation fighter jet to establish air superiority in the future and that other manned and unmanned platforms could have a similar result.

“Rather than building a newer, more advanced fighter jet, the Air Force may consider a different concept and ‘disaggregating,’ major subsystems such as the radar or weapons, and moving those to other platforms such as CCAs [collaborative combat aircraft],” the Congressional Research Service assessed in a recent report.

As a result of this debate, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall ordered a study on the NGAD program.
To make matters more complicated, it doesn’t help that the projected cost for the NGAD is astronomically high: Pentagon and industry officials have cited numbers hovering around $300 million per aircraft.

The Air Force’s NGAD and the Navy’s F/A-XX projects are highly important ones that could determine the course of a future near-peer conflict with China or Russia. The sixth-generation stealth fighter jets that these projects are expected to produce would help ensure air superiority in such a conflict. And in an operational environment like the Indo-Pacific, air and naval assets become immediately more valuable.

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