The Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter would make it easier to win the most stressing high-end conflicts, the Air Force’s future force designer said Feb. 26, as the future of the program remains uncertain.
Maj. Gen. Joseph D. Kunkel, director of force design, integration, and wargaming for the Air Force, said during an event with the Hudson Institute that extensive wargaming has shown “the fight looks fundamentally different with NGAD than without NGAD.”
“I won’t go into the details on how the fight looks different, but the fight looks much better when NGAD is in it,” Kunkel added. “NGAD remains an important part of our force design, and it fundamentally changes the character of the fight in a really, really good way for the joint force. I mean, it’s a joint force capability.”
Because the planned sixth-generation fighter would provide capabilities for the entire joint force, the decision to pursue it will go beyond the Air Force, Kunkel said. Should leaders decide to do so, the fighter would provide “dominant capability” versus other approaches, he said.
“If we choose not to—as a nation—pursue NGAD, then that fight can just look a little bit different … and we may not be able to pursue or achieve all of our policy objectives,” he added.
Originally, the Air Force planned to pick a contractor for NGAD by the end of 2024, but former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall paused the program last summer because he said it wasn’t clear if its requirements still matched the threat, and its high cost threatened to crowd out other spending priorities.
To analyze the program and other potential paths, such as a new multirole fighter like the F-35, Kendall formed a special blue-ribbon team comprised of former Air Force chiefs and stealth experts. The panel determined the program is needed and should go ahead as structured.
Yet Kendall ultimately left the final decision to the incoming Trump administration.
It’s a decision, Kunkel said, that comes with other implications—he called NGAD part of a “package deal” that requires investments in stealthy tankers and bases to fully work.
The future Air Force is being designed to attack an enemy’s kill chains, Kunkel said. NGAD would be able to take on many parts of them, “but there are other places along this kill chain that we can attack the adversary, and that’s the approach we’re taking. We’re taking it from a systems approach,” he said.
That systems approach will also have to be joint, he said, citing wargaming analysis.
When comparing approaches, “the Navy was like, ‘that’s us. We have the same problems,’” Kunkel said, and where once there was an “air/sea battle” strategy team-up between the Air Force and Navy, “there might be a new ‘air/space/sea battle’” concept taking shape.
The Air Force’s recently completed future force design, which remains largely classified, is based on years of work that determined that simply building new versions of existing platforms doesn’t work.
Officials looked at a stand-off force—attacking an enemy only from long-range—a stand-in force, and an “asymmetric” force that exclusively targets single points of failure and vulnerabilities.
Kunkel dismissed speculation that the Air Force is abandoning the stand-in fight and retreating to a stand-off force.
“An all-long-range force sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?” he said. “You sit in Topeka, Kansas, you press a red button, the war gets fought. Nobody gets hurt. It’s all done at long range.”
Long-range fires “are extremely important. They’re absolutely game changing,” Kunkel added. “They’re going to help us out. They’re going to be able to deliver a massive punch to the adversary, but they’re probably not going to do it at the tempo that’s required to keep the adversary … on its knees all the time. You need something else. You need something inside … .that can generate tempo and mass.
“So I will adamantly say we are not transitioning to this all-long-range force, because alone, that just doesn’t work.”
And while some observers have worried that the service is scaling back its mission of air superiority, Kunkel said that’s not the case. The new force design, he said, actually strengthens that mission by pursuing it in multiple ways, though he declined to say what those were.
Although he couldn’t get into the asymmetric capabilities the Air Force is pursuing, Kunkel did say they “allow us to be places where we wouldn’t otherwise be, and allow us to be persistent in those locations of particular high-threat density.”
Air Force leaders have said they can no longer achieve air supremacy across an entire theater against a peer adversary, and Kunkel said in the new approach, “we do pulses and achieve air superiority at times and places of our choosing with some of the asymmetric capabilities.”
He also said “what we’re finding is you can deny the adversary freedom of maneuver in the air domain, and that’s what our joint force wants. What we can’t have is, we can’t have the adversary free to roam around, free to have their own air superiority. We’ve got to deny them from doing that.”
Kunkel said “the magic happens when you weave those things together into what we’re calling a ‘mission fabric.’ Where you combine everything together, that’s where you start seeing in a mission thread or a kill chain-like fashion, in a new war fighting concept, that we’re actually winning, and that’s what’s really, really exciting.”