WASHINGTON — The Air Force is concentrated on avoiding the mistakes that plagued past programs just like the F-35, because the service officially kicks off its effort to construct a sixth-generation fighter, Secretary Frank Kendall said Monday.
That features ensuring the Air Force has access to all of the sustainment data it needs from the contractor constructing the Next Generation Air Dominance platform, Kendall told reporters at a breakfast roundtable hosted by the Defense Writers Group.
“We’re not going to repeat the, what I believe frankly was a serious mistake that was made within the F-35 program” of not obtaining rights to all of the fighter’s sustainment data from contractor Lockheed Martin, Kendall said.
When the F-35 program was launched greater than 20 years ago, Kendall said an acquisition philosophy often known as Total System Performance was in favor. Under this approach, he said, a contractor that won a program would own it for its entire lifecycle.
“What that principally does is create a perpetual monopoly,” Kendall said. “I spent years struggling to beat acquisition malpractice [on the F-35], and we’re still fighting that to some extent. So we’re not going to do this with NGAD.”
Kendall also singled out excessive concurrency — which occurs when an aircraft moving through development and into procurement at the identical time, which might make it harder to repair problems discovered in testing — as a significant problem that hindered the F-35 program.
There shall be some concurrency on NGAD, in addition to the B-21 Raider stealth bomber, Kendall said. But he said the Air Force plans to do this “in a rational way, that doesn’t take excessive risk.”
Kendall said he wants the federal government to have way more control over NGAD than it does with the F-35. As well as to making sure the federal government has access to the mental property it needs, Kendall said the Air Force will ensure that NGAD’s manufacturer and subcontractors use modular open system design. That can allow the Air Force to usher in recent and different suppliers because it seeks to upgrade parts of the system, he said.
The Air Force’s program executive officer for fighters and advanced aircraft at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, who’s now Brig. Gen. Dale White, shall be in command of the brand new program, Kendall said.
With NGAD expected to be a really expensive proposition — Kendall told lawmakers in April 2022 he expected each aircraft to cost multiple tons of of tens of millions of dollars apiece — the Air Force won’t give you the option to afford working with multiple contractors on this system, Kendall said. The service plans to decide on a single contractor to construct NGAD sometime in 2024, with Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman expected to compete for this system.
Kendall also said the acquisition strategy for collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) is moving forward in parallel with NGAD, and the Air Force is working with several potential suppliers to create autonomous drone wingmen related to that idea. He said it’s too soon to say what number of vendors the Air Force plans to work with, but that he wants “as many as possible.”
He declined to explain how CCA capabilities might compare to crewed fighters, saying that information is classed.
Kendall said NGAD’s origins date back to the Obama administration, when he in his previous role because the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics asked the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to check what the Air Force would wish to make sure it could dominate the skies in a future war.
DARPA’s response, Kendall said, was that the service didn’t just need a lone fighter — it needed a “family of systems,” also encompassing weapons, connections to assets in space, and possibly autonomous drone wingmen.
Kendall then launched a program called the Aerospace Innovation Initiative to begin to develop technologies that may form the core of a sixth-generation fighter. That effort led to the creation of experimental prototype aircraft, which Kendall called X-planes, to flesh out those technologies and prove they will work.
Advancements in model-based systems engineering and digitalization also made it possible for each government and contractor design teams to work together way more efficiently, he said.
That’s what’s happening now with the offices developing NGAD, in keeping with Kendall, with government designers and bidding firms essentially working side-by-side at Wright-Patterson. Government designers have direct access to the databases firms are using to design their pitches for NGAD, he explained.
“Everybody lives principally in the identical design laboratory, in case you will, so we’ve got intimate knowledge of what the competitors are doing of their design,” Kendall said. “We’re very involved with them. … We’re going to have as integrated and as fully integrated a design process and contracting process as possible.”
This can be a more efficient approach than how acquisitions were run prior to now, where the contractor would deliver “piles and piles of documents” to the federal government to sort through. “Now you don’t wait for documents, you’ll be able to see the design firsthand,” Kendall said.
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.