The Air Force is deferring decisions on the Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter to the incoming Trump administration, opting to continue both its review of the program and the Technology Maturation and Risk Reduction contracts during the transition period, the service announced Dec. 5.
“The Secretary of the Air Force will defer the Next Generation Air Dominance way ahead decision to the next administration, while the Department of the Air Force continues its analysis and executes the necessary actions to ensure decision space remains intact for the NGAD program,” the service said in a press release.
The Air Force further said it is extending the current contracts for NGAD to “further mature designs/systems while ensuring the industry teams remain intact.” The service is also asking the industry competitors “to update their proposals to account for the delays resulting from the current pause (schedule/milestone update only).”
Boeing and Lockheed, each of which build fighters for the Air Force today, are the presumed competitors for NGAD. Northrop Grumman chief executive Kathy Warden previously revealed her company had declined to bid on the program, but would likely pursue the Navy’s next-gen fighter. Northrop is among those with contracts to develop engine/vehicle interfaces for NGAD, under the Next-Generation Aerospace Propulsion program, along with Boeing, Lockheed, GE Aerospace and RTX’s Pratt & Whitney.
Officials had previously said they planned to award an engineering and manufacturing development contract or contracts for NGAD—it’s not clear if there would be one or two—this fall. However, over the summer, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall ordered a “pause” on the program, saying the Air Force was no longer certain that the requirements set for it matched the evolving threat. He also acknowledged the price tag for NGAD—Kendall has said it would be “multiple hundreds of millions” of dollars per tail—was prohibitively high without more resources.
Kendall ordered an internal review of the program and formed a blue-ribbon panel of former Air Force leaders with unique knowledge of stealth projects to provide advice. No end date for the review was set, although senior service leaders suggested it would be finished before the Air Force’s fiscal 2026 budget proposal went to the Office of Management and Budget.
The NGAD is the centerpiece of the Air Force’s plans for achieving air superiority in the future and is one of Kendall’s seven “operational imperatives”; the capability development efforts considered most crucial to the service’s ability to credibly deter or defeat a peer adversary.
At AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber conference in September, Kendall said he thought the central, crewed platform in the NGAD family of systems could—with new technologies and a revised operating concept—be acquired for the same cost as an F-35, the last price for which was around $80 million a copy for the Air Force variant.
An Air Force spokesperson said that in updating their proposals, the contractors will not be amending their technical concepts, but simply adjusting their cost estimates, taking into account delays accruing from the “pause,” which was ordered in July. She also said there is sufficient money in the program to accommodate the extension without further budgetary action.
The spokesperson said she could not reveal the number of participating contractors, the value of the TMRR contracts, or the expected duration of the extension. The program remains largely classified.
The spokesperson also said the Air Force is not planning to separate the budgets for the NGAD fighter and Collaborative Combat Aircraft, which are in the same developmental program element. Both have their own discrete line items within the program element and separating them is not necessary, she said. The CCA represents much of the “family of systems” that comprise the overall NGAD program.
The Air Force’s fiscal 2025 budget request for NGAD was $2.75 billion, and its forecast called for spending nearly $28.5 billion on it through the end of the decade, a figure including the CCA effort. For NGAD alone, the five-year plan calls for $19.6 billion in funding. The Air Force said in the ’25 budget that its ’26 request would be around $3.2 billion for NGAD alone.