To the Cloud! Sixth Gen Fighter “Concept” Flies, if Nothing Else

With all the (negative) attention the development of the F-35 and the KC-46 draws, the Air Force’s announcement its sixth-gen fighter “has come so far that the full-scale flight demonstrator has already flown in the physical world” and has “broken a lot of records in the doing” per service acquisition chief Will Roper caught me off-guard.

The Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) initiative’s promise of combining the best of the F-22 and -35, while collapsing acquisition time frames, beating budget through full-rate production, and with affordable, reliable sustainment is unsurprising; I just got the tune out of my head.

The Navy also has stood up a program office for its sixth-generation fighter, also called NGAD (just don’t call it JSF), which may comprise a suite of flying tech centered around a multirole fighter, likely from Boeing, because, what other options are there? To be clear, the Navy wants a cleansheet design, not a 737 MAX–like update to its Super Hornets.

This new jet will be manned and, this is on the record, put the capabilities of the F-35 “into an architecture that’s designed around a 21st-century model.” Two twenty-first century models I did not speak to acknowledged such a feat may involve “magical thinking,” but that Elon Musk had “the right idea.”

Marcus Weisgerber at Defense One updates us on the Navy’s planning for the F/A-18 Super Hornet replacement and finds “few details have emerged” aside from teases of no vertical stabilizer for increased stealth. Meanwhile, I implore you not to google “rudder hardover.”

What is clear is that Lockheed will develop the Air Force’s NGAD variant and Boeing the Navy’s. Both have now so mastered the art of politicizing the supply chain they can support the simultaneous development of two superfast, superstealthy fighters that leave only cost overruns as contrails. Meanwhile building up that “distributed lethality” response to the A2/AD challenge will continue to stress defense thinkers and budgets.

We are through the looking-glass and past the point where middle-tier solutions or a tailored DOD 5000 can solve our nation’s acquisition issues. We cannot develop and sustain it all. It is time for the entire acquisition community—little- and big-A alike—to remind policy-makers, funders, and programs that indecision is the worst decision and will make sequestration look like the salad days, with unpredictable and dangerous consequences.