WASHINGTON — A measure within the House’s fiscal 2024 defense policy bill goals to maintain various technologies related to the Next Generation Air Dominance program moving forward in sync, at the same time as one lawmaker said the Navy has fallen behind its Air Force counterparts here.
The supply within the FY24 National Defense Authorization Act would require each the Navy and Air Force secretaries to submit alongside their annual budget requests “development and technology maturation progress reports” for the Next Generation Air Dominance program and the complementary effort for collaborative combat aircraft.
NGAD is a sixth-generation fighter program that will pair with unmanned aircraft, including the CCA acting as a so-called loyal wingman.
Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., who chairs the House Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces, told Defense News that “the Navy needs to hurry that up, in order that’s why we would like to report on what they’re doing.”
The Air Force is juggling several technology development efforts in parallel, including work on advanced engines and a next-generation tanker to offer the NGAD fighter additional range in highly contested environments. Wittman said he wants to make sure one technology doesn’t fall behind, and potentially result in bad decisions for other components.
If the varied technology development efforts are properly aligned, “we are able to either deliver on time or deliver to the left,” or ahead of schedule, he explained.
One nightmare scenario, he said, is that the aircraft’s development gets ahead of engine development, and the Air Force eventually realizes it made a nasty decision that will have been avoided if the engine had matured faster.
“We wish to see all those things occur in a sequence where one takes advantage of the opposite … so we’re making maximum use of resources,” Wittman said of the annual reporting requirement.
Asked concerning the gap between the Navy’s and the Air Force’s progress on NGAD, Wittman said the Navy must set its requirements beyond simply looking for a carrier-based fighter.
The Air Force about five years ago realized its fifth-generation fighters were in danger from Chinese weapons inside the first island chain, Wittman noted. (The primary island chain runs parallel to the mainland of the Asian continent, starting within the Kuril Islands, through the Japanese Archipelago; includes Taiwan and the northwestern portion of the Philippines; and finishes in Borneo.)
The Navy, he added, at first believed it could mitigate the threat by keeping its aircraft carriers farther away and sending its fifth-generation F-35Cs in together with tankers to extend their range. But, Wittman continued, the jets and the tankers are still in danger, and so this sixth-generation NGAD program is vital to the ocean service.
“The Navy is behind, and I don’t want the Air Force to mark time while the Navy’s attempting to catch up,” Wittman said.
“But I do think the things that the Air Force is doing will inform the Navy, and the Navy should, with that, have the opportunity to make big steps forward that they otherwise couldn’t make in the event that they were doing this on their very own. So what our expectation is, is the Navy can do a major amount of catch-up, based upon what the Air Force is doing.”
Megan Eckstein is the naval warfare reporter at Defense News. She has covered military news since 2009, with a deal with U.S. Navy and Marine Corps operations, acquisition programs and budgets. She has reported from 4 geographic fleets and is happiest when she’s filing stories from a ship. Megan is a University of Maryland alumna.