The Air Force in recent years placed a $20 billion bet on the Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) “family of systems” to ensure control of the air in a future conflict—a core mission increasingly challenged by Chinese fifth-generation fighters and ground-based air defenses.
Now leaders seem to be hedging, with senior service leaders indicating concern over NGAD’s costs and raising questions about the future of U.S. air dominance.
Any change to NGAD’s scope or timing would force a complete rethinking of the Air Force’s “4+1” fighter force design introduced in 2020. That plan’s four lead aircraft included F-35s, F-15EXs, F-16s, and NGAD—and notably left out the F-22, which would have faded from the fleet by the late 2020s.
Now, with NGAD potentially delayed or worse, the F-22 seems more likely to remain in the inventory well beyond 2030.
Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin answered haltingly when asked at an AFA event if NGAD’s budget was secure. NGAD is among the “choices” USAF is facing “across the landscape,” Allvin said. Those decisions will “probably play out in the next couple of years or by this ’26 [program objective memoranda] cycle.”
At a group interview the following day Allvin elaborated: “We’re looking at a lot of very difficult options that we have to consider,” he said. NGAD “deliberations are still underway. … There has been no decision made.”
Inflation, spending caps imposed by the Fiscal Responsibility Act, and rising military pay are all taking their toll on future Air Force budgets. With billions already committed to purchasing F-35 fighters, B-21 bombers, KC-46 tankers, and T-7 trainers—not to mention the Sentinel ICBM, which is now $40 billion over budget—NGAD is among the few large-scale programs that can be cut or delayed right now. Moving it from research and development into procurement only adds to that budget pain, and does little to the short-term “fight tonight” readiness that also demands more funding.
“We cannot pursue a lot of eggs in one basket, and then find the threat has advanced,” Allvin said. That suggests the Air Force may fear NGAD should be better attuned to collaborating with other USAF capabilities than originally envisioned.
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, seeking to quell concerns about NGAD’s future, told Defense News in June that the NGAD “family-of-systems concept … is alive and well.” But he acknowledged that service leaders are “looking at the NGAD platform design concept to see if it’s the right concept or not.”
More to the point, leaders are asking whether “we can do something that’s less expensive and do some trade-offs there.” For example, he said, while he’s “confident” there will be an NGAD aircraft, he’s only “reasonably confident” it will be crewed. The NGAD needs more substantive analysis.
The expected unit cost of NGAD’s central platform—a crewed, extremely low-observable combat aircraft—will cost in the “multiple hundreds of millions” of dollars each, Kendall has said in the past. Acquiring 200 aircraft at that cost could push the program cost to close to $100 billion.
Far less costly are the autonomous Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA)—uncrewed jets developed to operate in conjunction with manned fighters to provide affordable mass. As many as six CCAs could be controlled by a single manned platform—and at the relative bargain price of around $27 million a copy.
A network of sensors and communications relays needed to support the Air Force’s long-range kill chain is thought to round out the NGAD family of systems.
Kendall told Defense News that NGAD must be “optimized to work with CCAs,” which have developed rapidly at a point when NGAD was already well along in its development. He suggested NGAD’s design may have to be adjusted both to bring down its eye-watering unit cost and to better work with CCAs.
“Scale matters, numbers matter, and so does time,” Kendall said, indicating an NGAD contract is still to be awarded this year, as planned.
Competitors for that contract appear to be Boeing and Lockheed Martin; Northrop Grumman said last year it won’t bid on the program, although it did receive an NGAD engine integration contract. Northrop has said it may pursue a Navy advanced fighter contract.
NGAD and the F-22
Whatever happens with NGAD will likely impact the future of the F-22 Raptor, which is currently planned to end its service life by around 2030.
The Air Force has twice asked Congress for permission to retire its oldest F-22s, but was rebuffed both times. Air Combat Command’s 32 Block 20 Raptors—jets that were never upgraded to today’s combat configuration—are among the most costly noncombat-rated aircraft in the inventory, USAF leaders have said.
In July, ACC Commander Gen. Kenneth S. Wilsbach said he too opposes divesting those aircraft. Speaking at an AFA Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies event. Wilsbach argued for keeping the F-22s.
First, no NGAD contract has yet been awarded, he said, so technically, “there is no” F-22 replacement yet. He also said the Block 20 F-22s still have combat value, even if they’re not updated to the current Raptor fleet configuration.
“I’m in favor of keeping the Block 20s,” he said. “They give us a lot of training value, and even if we had to—in an emergency—use [them] in a combat situation, they’re very capable.”
Air Force planners have argued they need to redirect the manpower, operations, and maintenance savings to NGAD. Upgrading the Block 20s to the current fleet configuration would be expensive: $50 million or more per tail, according to Kendall.
That is costly, but less expensive than new F-35s or F-15EXs, and those production lines are already at maximum output. The Block 20s offer stealthy capacity at a time when the Air Force’s overall inventory is shrinking, advocates say. Opponents counter that such funds would be better invested in keeping new programs on track.
ACC’s Wilsbach called the F-22 a “fantastic aircraft” that the Air Force is still upgrading, “as we speak.” Among the pending improvements: a highly sensitive infrared search and track system to spot adversaries with low radar cross sections; stealthy fuel tanks to extend the F-22’s range; and a new, long-range missile that is expected to help the Raptor regain the “first shot, first kill” advantage it had when new.
In all, USAF is investing $7 billion to develop and field those upgrades, making the timing of their introduction puzzling if the service really intends on retiring the aircraft in the late 2020s, just two years shy of its sunset.
Taken together with Wilsbach’s defense of the F-22, it seems likely the Raptor will remain a while longer.
Secretary James Weighs In
Meanwhile, former Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James is among those pressing to keep NGAD on track. In a June 26 op-ed in Defense News, she argued that Congress and the administration should “fund the Air Force to ensure the continuity” of NGAD, and urged the Air Force to “explore alternative design and acquisition strategies to significantly reduce the cost of NGAD and expedite [its] … delivery.”
James acknowledged that the litany of extra expenses facing the Air Force is long and “there’s not enough money to pay for all of it.” But China is “ruthlessly advancing its NGAD equivalent and does not appear to be slowing down due to budgetary concerns,” she wrote. Given China’s aggressive moves in and around the South China Sea, the NGAD must be a top priority, according to James.
“The 2030s will be upon us in an instant, so we can’t afford to delay NGAD,” James wrote. “Doing so would mean risking loss in a future conflict.”
James championed a concept first offered by former Air Force acquisition executive Will Roper, who said creating a new “Century Series,” modelled after the F-100 to F-106 series jets of the 1960s, would accelerate innovation. “This approach would involve less expensive and quicker-to-produce fighters with iterative designs that could change every few years if necessary,” she wrote. She urged “out-of-the-box thinking” to find the funds needed for NGAD.
Searching for a Back Story
Why did Allvin raise questions about NGAD now? Retired Lt. Gen. David Deptula, dean of AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, noted that the entire Air Force budget is under pressure and NGAD is “not the only major mission priority of the Air Force that is in crisis mode.”
USAF’s two-decades-long procurement holiday means the service must modernize its intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance fleet, tanker fleet, trainer fleet, and command and control fleet at the same time as it updates fighters, bombers, and ICBMs. The only solution is more funding, Deptula argued.
Following 9/11 and for the next two decades, it made sense that the Army enjoy the lion’s share of funding among the services, Deptula said, because the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were ground-intensive conflicts. Air Force modernization moved to the back burner then. But now the Air Force is older and smaller than any time in its history, and rebuilding air superiority and combat capacity should be a national priority.
“We’re no longer in Iraq or Afghanistan,” Deptula said. “It’s time to shift the resources to make the Air Force whole again.”
It’s possible service leaders are speaking out to highlight the risks they see in failing to invest sufficiently to have a credible deterrent. But that’s because the Air Force finds itself “in an untenable position,” with all the long-deferred modernization bills “coming due at the same time.”
This is the question Deptula asked: “What kind of Air Force do you want?”
Air Force officials have said privately that giving up on NGAD would mean giving up on a stand-in force able to penetrate enemy air defenses and attack targets directly. A purely stand-off force would demand huge volumes of high-cost, long-range missiles launched well outside enemy air defenses.
That won’t work, Deptula said. “You need to be able to do both. You cannot win a conflict of any type with a purely stand-off force,” he said. “There are simply too many aimpoints to deal with.”
That leaves U.S. leaders with few options. One is to increase resources for the Air Force; the other is to “reassess the National Security Strategy,” reducing expectations of the Air Force that remains, Deptula said. “I seriously doubt any administration or Congress would lessen the demands of our global approach.”
Pentagon and congressional decision-makers should rethink their approach to military investment, and focus on “greatest effect per dollar invested,” Deptula said. Doing so would argue strongly for NGAD, he believes. Because, he said, “there’s no way to win without the ability to achieve air and space superiority.”