The Air Force and Navy have briefed President Donald Trump on their respective Next-Generation Air Dominance programs, asking that the projects proceed largely as they now stand, government and industry sources told Air & Space Forces Magazine. It’s not clear whether the services came away with firm decisions about the future of the aircraft.
The White House requested the briefings, sources said. Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin presented the Air Force case, while Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. James Kilby gave the Navy brief.
In its 2025 budget request, the Air Force outlined $19.6 billion in NGAD spending in the next five years, making it the most expensive program in the service’s research and development budget.
While the Navy intends to award a contract of its version of a sixth-generation fighter—called the F/A-XX—in the coming months, the Air Force NGAD has been on a “pause” since last summer, when former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall ordered a review of the program. He wanted to know if NGAD as structured was still necessary, or whether air superiority can be achieved in a less costly way. Kendall has quoted a figure of “multiple hundreds of millions” per NGAD fighter, which would succeed the F-22 as the Air Force’s most advanced air superiority aircraft.
Kendall later said another option looked at was a more “multirole” aircraft, along the lines of the F-35, but designed to control many autonomous Collaborative Combat Aircraft. The CCA effort is on the same budget line as NGAD.
Since then, an internal Air Force review, as well as one from a blue-ribbon commission of stealth experts, has concluded the capabilities of NGAD are still required, despite its high cost, especially in the event of war with China. The NGAD is usually described as a “family of systems,” with a crewed sixth-gen fighter—known as the Penetrating Combat Aircraft—at the center of a formation which includes autonomous escorts and other off-board systems. Service leaders in recent weeks have said it’s important to get right the “mix” of NGAD and CCAs.
Kendall, who was on the verge of announcing a winner in the NGAD competition in December, opted to leave the decision on how to proceed to the incoming Trump administration because, he said, it would have to live with the choice. The Air Force has since given the two remaining NGAD competitors contracts of an undisclosed value for Technology Maturation and Risk Reduction (TMRR). An industry source said the TMRR contracts, which extend through the end of the fiscal year, will allow refinement of their proposals, but more importantly, keep the two design teams together and “momentum” going until a way forward is decided, he said.
Allvin, speaking March 18 at the McAleese annual Defense Program Conference, said “the family-of-systems does need a high-end penetrating capability.” As to whether the new administration will greenlight the project, he said “with regard to the overall package” of proposed air superiority solutions, “I think this administration will be making that decision, and we’re going to move out on that. But you do need the ability to maintain air superiority and penetrate contested environments.”
At the AFA Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colo., earlier this month, Allvin said the U.S. is in a particularly “dangerous and dynamic” period, and he wants to be able to “give the president as many options as we possibly can.” That means “yes, NGAD.”
In the months since Kendall’s pause on the NGAD program, service leaders have emphatically denied they are ceding the stand-in air battle to adversaries and shifting toward a stand-off force.
“The fight looks fundamentally different with NGAD than without NGAD,” Maj. Gen. Joseph D. Kunkel, the Air Force’s director of force design, integration and wargaming, said at the Hudson Institute in February.
The fight “looks much better when NGAD is in it,” he said. It “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.” With the NGAD, the fight “is easier,” he said. Without it, “we may not be able to pursue or achieve all of our policy objectives.”
Either way, what the Air Force must have, Kunkel said, is a mixture of stand-in, stand-off, and “asymmetric” capabilities to achieve air superiority where and when the Air Force most needs. He also noted that NGAD is a “package deal” and requires an advanced, stealth tanker and the success of the CCA concept to work.
The Navy and the Air Force are not pursuing a joint NGAD program as they did with the F-35; each NGAD is optimized to the respective services’ needs. However, each branch is observing the other’s effort and the two services have agreed to share, as much as possible, enabling capabilities such as propulsion, avionics, sensors, and weapons.
Industry officials have said that Lockheed Martin recently withdrew from the Navy program, leaving Boeing and Northrop Grumman as the likely contenders; Northrop CEO Kathy Warden has said her company is pursuing the project. She also reported Northrop is not seeking the Air Force contract, which is therefore likely a contest between Boeing and Lockheed.
Lt. Gen. Dale R. White, the Air Force’s senior uniformed acquisition official, said at the McAleese conference that while the NGAD decision was paused, “we did not pause the approach and strategy and the things we’re doing to make sure we have the technology.”
White, who said he was in on the “ground floor” of the NGAD program, said it was created with “an acquisition strategy that allows you to make real-time decisions.”
The strategy requires that “you maximize competition. And you define all off-ramps. You define trades. …As what we call ‘real life happenings’ occur, we can make real-time adjustments.”
He also said the program has proved to be a pathfinder in three areas that will govern all future Air Force programs: “digital engineering, open architectures and modern software practices.” This approach ensures that the “government [has] greater control” in steering upgrades and modernization of the system. He likened the NGAD to a smartphone, with many apps that can be added and deleted as needed without restructuring the platform. This “common architecture that multiple platforms and systems subscribe to … that’s going to drive a level of interoperability that we’ve never seen.”
Pentagon Editor Chris Gordon contributed to this report.