The U.S. Air Force has not abandoned its program to construct a sophisticated next-generation fighter, nevertheless it does need a redesign to get costs under control and higher integrate its planned drone wingmen, the service’s secretary told Defense News in an exclusive interview.
Secretary Frank Kendall also said a revamped Next Generation Air Dominance fighter platform could find yourself with a less complex, smaller engine than originally intended to attempt to hold down its price.
“The family of systems concept of Next Generation Air Dominance is alive and well,” Kendall said June 28. “I can let you know that we’re taking a look at the NGAD platform design concept to see if it’s the fitting concept or not. … We’re taking a look at whether we are able to do something that’s inexpensive and do some trade-offs there.”
NGAD is meant to switch the F-22 Raptor fighter fleet within the 2030s. It’s a highly classified program featuring a crewed sixth-generation fighter with adaptive engines that may switch to essentially the most efficient configuration as flying conditions change. The trouble also calls for autonomous drone wingmen — often known as collaborative combat aircraft, or CCA — and other latest systems similar to cutting-edge sensors, weaponry, and technology that improves the jet’s ability to attach with satellites and other aircraft.
Top Air Force officials have repeatedly stressed such a network, including aircraft beyond the capabilities of fifth-generation F-35 jets, will likely be obligatory to win wars.
“It’s crystal clear to us that with a view to get into the early to mid-[20]30s with a force that may win, we’ve got to get to a sixth-gen fighter, and that’s NGAD,” retiring Lt. Gen. Richard Moore, who was the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for plans and programs, said in April 2023.
But the worth tag for such a system has long been a looming stumbling block, and rumors have swirled in recent weeks that NGAD is perhaps endangered because the cash-strapped Air Force draws up its fiscal 2026 budget. The Air Force is now within the means of modernizing two expensive legs of its nuclear triad, at the same time as it faces rising personnel costs and deals with the fallout from the Fiscal Responsibility Act’s budget caps for FY25.
At an Air and Space Forces Association event in June, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin hedged when asked whether the service can proceed with NGAD given its tight budgets. He later told reporters the service continues to be considering which method to go together with this system.
Kendall also told Aviation Week that the service is having to reconsider its spending plans for FY26 as competing priorities mount up, and that it must discover the combination of systems obligatory to supply dominant air power.
In his interview with Defense News on the Pentagon, Kendall said NGAD is now expected to cost roughly 3 times as much as a person F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. With F-35s costing about $80 million to $100 million, meaning NGAD’s price tag could possibly be verging on $300 million apiece — and would greatly limit the dimensions of a its potential fleet.
“It’s a really expensive platform,” Kendall said. “It’s 3 times, roughly, the associated fee of an F-35, and we are able to only afford it in small numbers.”
When asked what goal cost he wants for NGAD, Kendall said the Air Force isn’t far enough along to set such a goal — but added with a chuckle: “Ideally, I’d wish to get it all the way down to lower than an F-35, or a minimum of within the ballpark of an F-35. F-35s, as you already know, usually are not low-cost airplanes.”
Kendall reiterated that the Air Force will construct a next-generation crewed fighter platform, and said he believes it’s going to be based on the technologies developed for the Aerospace Innovation Initiative. That initiative was a method — which Kendall kicked off in his previous role because the Pentagon’s acquisition chief, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency initially led alongside the Air Force and Navy — to develop prototype X-planes and a next-generation engine that ultimately led to the present NGAD effort.
Nonetheless, Kendall said, “the design concept that got here out of that [initiative] is a really expensive concept. Scale matters, numbers matter, and so does time. We would like to get something there quickly.”
Together with in search of ways to bring down costs, Kendall said the Air Force wants to make sure NGAD can take full advantage of CCAs because it is redesigned. He noted the CCA concept got here along after the service had begun working to develop NGAD.
“Having something that’s optimized to work with CCAs is one other consideration as we take a look at NGAD,” Kendall said.
A smaller, cheaper engine?
The Air Force can be taking a look at NGAD’s cutting-edge propulsion system — a so-called adaptive engine — because it reconsiders its future fighter concept, Kendall said.
Clint Hinote, a retired three-star general and former deputy chief of staff for strategy, integration and requirements within the Air Force, told Defense News on June 21 that the Next-Generation Adaptive Propulsion program was quite expensive and could possibly be driving up NGAD’s overall costs.
“The last numbers I saw on NGAP [Next Generation Adaptive Propulsion] were pretty high,” said Hinote, who was previously in command of the Air Force Futures organization. “I do think that’s an element. I don’t know if that’s the one factor, or the factor that’s really contributing to this decision. Nevertheless it is true that the NGAP program, the event of an adaptive engine for the NGAD, was very costly.”
When asked if the propulsion system’s cost is making it harder for the Air Force to afford NGAD, Kendall replied: “What we’re in search of there may be essentially the most cost-effective propulsion system for the platform.”
The Air Force still wants to make use of the engine technologies it developed to offer NGAD more range and fuel efficiency, he said. But because it seeks to bring costs down for NGAD, he noted, “the best way you try this is for those who can reduce the complexity, but additionally the dimensions of the engine.”
While the engine and other systems intended for NGAD represented a technological breakthrough, Hinote said, it was not out of reach from what he saw before he retired last yr.
“We were making really good headway,” Hinote said. “High-pass engines, sensors — all that was coming together, I assumed, pretty much.”
The adaptive engine technology that may be the muse of NGAP is “revolutionary,” Hinote added.
General Electric Aerospace in addition to Pratt & Whitney have each developed their very own versions of an adaptive engine. The engine’s ability to shift its configuration to best reply to any given situation could be a serious advancement in propulsion technology, Hinote said.
“If the [airplane’s] need is efficient cruise at high altitude, then [the adaptive engine would shift to a configuration] that appears so much like a high-bypass engine, not all that dissimilar from the engines you’re seeing on the underside of Airbus and Boeing airliners immediately,” Hinote said.
High-bypass engines on aircraft similar to 737s have large inlets that allow a terrific deal of air to go through, he explained, which makes them very efficient. It’s not feasible to place an engine with such a big inlet on a fighter, but Hinote said adaptive engines can produce the identical performance characteristics as a high-bypass engine at cruising speeds and altitudes.
And when a pilot must hit the afterburner and go to supersonic speeds, he added, “then you definately crank the engine down, you modify the geometry of the winglets, and now you’ve got a completely different engine that adapts to the demand given by the pilot.”
But those capabilities don’t come low-cost. The associated fee of an adaptive engine was certainly one of the aspects that thwarted the Air Force’s desire to place it within the F-35, together with its incompatibility with the Marine Corps’ vertical-landing version and possibly the Navy’s carrier-based variant.
When asked concerning the potentially high cost for NGAP, Pratt & Whitney told Defense News it’s working with the Air Force to make use of a collaborative digital design to drive down costs.
“We have now already seen improved efficiency and effectiveness, leading to cost and time saving because of digital collaborative work environments,” Peter Sommerkorn, the corporate’s executive director of sixth-generation programs, said within the statement.
Sommerkorn added that upgrades to the firm’s ceramic matrix composites facility in Carlsbad, California, in addition to its turbine airfoil factory in Asheville, North Carolina, will get monetary savings on current and future propulsion programs.
GE Aerospace referred Defense News’ inquiries to the Air Force.
Kendall highlighted an op-ed certainly one of his predecessors as secretary, Deborah Lee James, published in Defense News arguing NGAD is just too necessary to kill for budgetary reasons, and said he’s in almost total agreement along with her.
Within the op-ed, James wrote the Air Force must “explore alternative design and acquisition strategies” to get NGAD’s costs down and speed up its delivery. She said Congress and the Pentagon need to supply the Air Force enough funds for all of its major programs, and that the service should look to “revolutionary design and acquisition strategies” similar to constructing inexpensive fighters that could be more quickly made and repeatedly updated.
The Air Force hopes to spend greater than $2.7 billion on research and development for NGAD in FY25, with one other $557 million slated for CCAs. The service projects its R&D spending on NGAD to steadily rise within the years to return, reaching greater than $8.8 billion in FY29, alongside $3.1 billion in CCA spending.
The Air Force has repeatedly sought to retire about 32 older Block 20 F-22A Raptor fighters — which the service says would cost an excessive amount of to make combat-capable — to unencumber billions of dollars for NGAD. Moore said in 2023 that mothballing those F-22s would save about $2.5 billion over five years.
But Congress last yr rejected the Air Force’s F-22 retirement proposal and appears poised to again stymie those plans within the FY25 budget.
The Air Force took a serious step forward on NGAD in May 2023 when it sent industry a classified solicitation for this system’s engineering and manufacturing development contract. Northrop Grumman has ruled out competing for NGAD as a chief contractor, leaving Lockheed Martin and Boeing the likely two remaining contenders.
The Air Force last yr said it intended to award that contract in 2024.
When asked if that contract continues to be coming this yr, Kendall said: “I’m not able to discuss any specific changes yet.”
Courtney Albon contributed to this report.
Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.