The appearance of new Chinese combat aircraft in recent weeks—potentially a new bomber and medium bomber, a smaller, fighter-size aircraft, and a new AWACS platform, among others—didn’t influence current Air Force leadership’s recent decisions on the Next-Generation Air Dominance program or the service’s broader strategic outlook, Secretary Frank Kendall said.
In an exit interview with Air & Space Forces Magazine, Kendall said the newly-revealed Chinese aircraft “have not had an impact” on how his team has approached NGAD; Kendall paused the program in summer 2024, launched a review of its requirements, and ultimately deferred a decision on the program’s future to the incoming Trump administration and the next civilian leaders of the Air Force.
“I’ve been watching China modernize their military for quite a while,” Kendall said. “They’re working aggressively to build a military designed to keep the U.S. out of the Western Pacific, and I think, over time, they have more ambitions than even that.”
Strategically, “they’ve already shown that they’re going to modernize their strategic forces and dramatically increase their inventory of nuclear weapons. And in space, they’re doing similar things, right? They’re really militarizing space at a high rate. So that was already baked into all the things we were thinking about, and the arrival of those … airplanes, visible to the public, hasn’t really changed that,” he said.
Indeed, Kendall said he still has no regrets about punting an NGAD decision to the new administration.
“Anything I did with a couple of months left in office was like to be reconsidered anyway, but it would be much harder to change direction” if contracts were awarded and the program was moved forward, he said. “Keeping that trade space open … was a much more efficient thing to do. It was just the right thing to do.”
Meanwhile, Kendall and his team will leave behind an extensive analysis of NGAD for their successors, allowing them to understand their options and then make their own choice based on their own strategic priorities.
NGAD, being a very expensive program, will be weighed against other high considerations, Kendall said, noting that there are “strategic priorities” for both the Air and Space Forces that must be addressed and weighed against various NGAD approaches.
“What motivated us to take another look [at NGAD] was the affordability” Kendall said, noting that there were other missions to which the service wanted to devote added resources such as “more aggressive counter-space capabilities, airbase protection, particularly our forward air bases.”
Yet affordability wasn’t the only issue, Kendall said, reiterating concerns that changing threats and technology also forced a reconsideration.
“My operators were not 100 percent sure they had the right airplane,” he said. “And I agree with that. I think it’s really worthwhile to think carefully about what is essentially an F-22 replacement. Is that really the right new design?”
The stakes of the decision are high, because “we’re not going to get another sixth-generation program any time soon. This is a tens of billions of dollars commitment, and it’s a multidecade commitment, so you really want to be sure you’re pursuing the best operational capability with those resources,” the secretary added.
Asked what recommendation his blue-ribbon panel of stealth experts—including analysts, former Chiefs of Staff, and senior generals—came up with regarding NGAD, Kendall said they reached “a consensus that there are a number of other things that we need to fund” but if resources are available, “then it would still be beneficial to have an NGAD-like aircraft.”
Kendall could not go into detail because of classification, but said several alternatives were considered.
“We looked at something that’s more of a lower-cost, multi-role kind of a capability. We looked at something that’s more tailored to work with [Collaborative Combat Aircraft], although, of course, NGAD could do that. And we looked at some other ’out of the box’” ideas, he said, adding that “some of them might be worth pursuing independently.”