The Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter would make it easier to win the most stressing combined-arms conflicts, the Air Force’s future force designer said. Wargaming has also shown that a mixture of standoff, stand-in and “asymmetric” approaches are needed to prevail in a future fight, not simply rebuilding the Air Force of today, he said.

Based on extensive wargaming, “The fight looks fundamentally different with NGAD than without NGAD,” said Maj. Gen. Joseph D. Kunkel, director of force design, integration, and wargaming, deputy chief of staff for Air Force futures, in a seminar at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.

“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 said.

“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.”

The decision to buy the system will likely be a pan-service decision, he said.

“If the Joint Force wants to fight with an NGAD” to achieve air superiority “in these really, really tough places, to achieve it, then we’ll pursue and …it’ll be, frankly…less operational risk” and provide “dominant capability” versus other approaches.

However, “if we choose not to–as a nation–to 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.”

Kunkel also noted that NGAD is one element of a “package deal,” in that it also “requires survivable tankers [and] survivable bases where you can generate combat power. So those are other investments that we need to make” if NGAD is to work.

A winner of the NGAD contract was supposed to be chosen by the end of 2024, but former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall left it to the incoming Trump Administration to decide whether to award a contract or re-think the program. Kendall “paused” NGAD 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. Since that decision was made the unnamed NGAD competitors have been on Technology Maturation and Risk Reduction (TMRR) contracts, which allow them to keep their design teams together and refine their approaches.  

Kendall said that a special blue-ribbon team he empaneled to scrutinize NGAD—comprised of former Air Force chiefs of staff and stealth experts—determined that the program is needed and should go ahead as structured. Kendall said alternatives that have been looked at include an F-35-like multirole fighter optimized to manage a number of autonomous Collaborative Combat Aircraft.   

The future Air Force is being designed to attack an enemy’s kill chains, Kunkel said. That means targeting the enemy’s ability to “find out where everybody is…and direct the forces to where they are, and then…some type of battle management…and then [they’ve]  got to guide a weapon.”

Though NGAD requires a survivable tanker—the Next-Generation aerial Refueling System, or NGAS—“The enemy’s got a lot of attack surfaces,” and the NGAD/NGAS approach will be important for some 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.”

Kunkel said the other services are finding that Joint solutions are the only ones that work under anticipated conditions.

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 teamup between the Air Force and Navy, “there might be a new ‘air/space/sea battle’” concept taking shape.

Kenkel said the “journey” toward a new future force design has been underway for ten years. Initially, the idea was, “We’ve always had fighters, so let’s look at new fighters. We’ve always had bombers, so let’s look at new bombers. And those things have done reasonably well, but when we do the analysis, what we find is, ‘just reinvent the Air Force’ doesn’t win.”

The Air Force looked at a stand-off force—attacking an enemy only from range—a stand-in force, and an “asymmetric” force that exclusively targets enemy single points of failure and vulnerabilities.

He 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.” But, “It doesn’t win because it just can’t sustain the tempo of the fight,” Kunkel said. He added that “when I say it doesn’t win, it doesn’t win by itself.”

Long-range fires “are extremely important. They’re absolutely game changing. 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. And that’s what we found, and that’s where the force design goes with this, you know, combined arms approach…We’ve got to 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.”

He said the new force design “doesn’t walk away from air superiority, it strengthens air superiority. But what you’ll see is, you’ll see us achieving air superiority in different ways,” and not simply with F-22s and AMRAAM missiles, or NGAD. It will be achieved “in multiple ways”–which Kunkel wouldn’t divulge—“and we’re finding this is absolutely critical.”

Although he couldn’t get into the asymmetric capabilities the Air Force is pursuing, 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.”

The Air Force has said it 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 offered that “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.” Analysis has shown adversaries “are strong at that, and it’s a gap we’ve had, and something they can fill.”

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.”

He said the Air Force is using an approach called Agile Wargame and Advanced Wargame, wherein “we are…quickly iterating our wargame to understand campaign results based on analysis that we can do very quickly…quicker than we ever have.” It permits running a wargame very quickly, “adjudicate what happened, and then try something else. And then, you know, see how that does, adjudicate it, and then try something else. And so we’ve been able to [in] very quick iterations, understand what wins and what doesn’t win.”

The new approach gets the Air Force “to this place where we find more winning capabilities. That’s really promising,” Kunkel said.