NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—The Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter—once envisioned as a hyper-expensive, exquisite platform—could be restructured to slash its price to less than an F-35, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told reporters at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber conference.
Kendall and other senior service officials also said decisions about the future of NGAD, begun just two months ago, must happen fast in order to inform the Air Force’s fiscal 2026 budget request, which will likely be wrapped up internally in just a couple of months.
Making NGAD less costly could mean sacrificing range and payload, possibly going from two engines to one, a counter-intuitive solution that could be possible only if the Air Force had a stealthy Next-Generation Air-refueling System (NGAS) that could evade adversary’s missile systems. Kendall linked NGAD and NGAS in his keynote address, before emphasizing a key commitment.
“We are not walking away from the core United States Air Force function of providing air superiority,” Kendall said in a keynote address, repeating the comment for emphasis.
Speaking to reporters later, Kendall said the options are all open for now on what NGAD could look like.
“We haven’t set a number or threshold” for the price, he said, before offering an intriguing suggestion: “I’ll just give you this off the top of my head: The F-35 kind of represents, to me, the upper bounds of what we’d like to pay.”
That would peg the target price at between $80 million and $100 million, a fraction of the “multiple hundreds of millions of dollars” Kendall has previously cited for NGAD. “I’d like to go lower, though.”
Getting to a lower price comes with disaggregating capability, shifting missions to other platforms. “… “Once you start integrating [Collaborative Combat Aircraft] CCAs and transferring some mission equipment and capabilities functions to the CCAs, then you can talk about a different concept,” Kendall said.
CCA costs are targeted in the zone of about $25 million. Those costs too must be managed, or the CCA becomes too expensive to sustain.
Kendall announced a “pause” on the NGAD selection this summer, citing cost and concern that developing technologies and emerging threats deserve to be examined before USAF commits to the program’s high cost. The Air Force is “taking a hard look” at the NGAD concept, he said.
“The design concept [is] several years old,” Kendall explained. “The requirements are several years old.” NGAD was meant to replace the F-22 and designed “very much for a specific mission under a specific set of circumstances.”
A reconsideration is needed “because of threat changes, because of financial constraints, because of the development of technology, including the introduction of CCAs,” Kendall said.
Cutting Costs
Given the gulf between Kendall’s previous price estimate and his new projection for NGAD, the question arises: How can the Air Force trim costs?
Vice Chief of Staff James C. Slife, in an earlier conference panel discussion, noted that the traditional method of developing a new air superiority fighter required “designing the characteristics around the platform; around the size of the radar you need, the range of the aircraft, how many Gs you wanted to pull. … You optimize for all of those things inside of a inside the platform.”
That will likely change, he suggested.
“We’ve gotten to a point where [with] our systems-level integration, we have the ability to disaggregate these capabilities and look at air superiority more broadly,” Slife said. “So the radar may be in one location, the munition may be in another location.”
If the Air Force gets it right, Slife said, “this will be an enduring source of competitive advantage for the United States military. … It is a potential step change in American military capability.”
Kendall noted that he started the NGAD prototyping program when he was the Director of Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics at the Pentagon in the 2010s. During that time, there was debate, he said, over whether to focus more on unmanned aircraft.
“My judgment at the time was that we weren’t quite ready to do that, but there were a number of other technologies that we needed to mature and demonstrate for the next, sixth generation, if you will,” he recalled.
The pause has led some to speculate whether NGAD might itself be unmanned, or optionally manned, but that does not seem to be the direction Kendall is leaning.
If an F-22-scale NGAD turns out “to be the most cost-effective operational answer, that’s what we’re going to do, and go fight for the money to have it.”
But if the price is too high, the fleet would be small. “The more the airplane costs, the fewer you’re going to have. Numbers do matter.”
Fast Review
Whatever the Air Force does, it has to move quickly, Kendall said, citing expectations from Congress and industry as well as the need to submit a 2026 budget.
Kendall has previously said the NGAD contract would be awarded this calendar year, but that won’t happen now.
To aid the process, the Air Force has assembled a blue-ribbon committee of senior former service leaders to review and possibly vet the service’s new approach to NGAD. The panel members, listed alphabetically, include three former chiefs of staff and two other experts:
- Natalie Crawford, a former top analyst and vice president at RAND, former director of Project Air Force.
- Retired Gen. David L. Goldfein, chief of staff from 2016-2020
- Retired Gen. John P. Jumper, chief of staff from 2001-2005
- Paul Kaminski, an Air Force veteran, expert on stealth, and former Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology from 1994-1997
- Retired Gen. Joseph Ralston, vice chairman of the joint chiefs from 1996-2000 and head of Air Combat Command from 1995 to 1996
- Retired Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, chief of staff from 2008-2012
Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin, during his own press conference, said the group comprises “a broad portfolio of experts with a mandate to “really assess our assessments, look at the evaluations we’re doing, making sure we’re really not missing anything in our analysis, in how we understand the threat and how we understand the capabilities that are going to be required of our Air Force to meet that threat. Their job is to look at that and give us feedback and insights that they see that will help us do this analysis that we have to do in fairly short order.”
The group will not make the final decision, though, Allvin said. He and Kendall “will get the final say on what will be proposed to the Office of the Secretary of Defense.” And of course, Congress “will have a say after that.”
Whether all that can be accomplished quickly is uncertain, though. If a radical change is needed in NGAD, it would likely mean terminating the previous program and starting over with a new trip through the Pentagon’s Joint Requirements Oversight Council process. Then it would need to go through the Office of Management and Budget. Collectively, it is a process which could take many months and likely not before the fiscal 2026 budget submission without top-level intervention.