US Air Force plans to award Next Generation Air Dominance deal in 2024

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force plans to award a contract for its Next Generation Air Dominance platform in 2024.

The service said in a Thursday release that it sent industry a classified solicitation for an engineering and manufacturing development contract for the secretive and highly classified NGAD program.

The discharge of this solicitation formally begins the strategy of choosing a contractor to construct the Air Force’s next advanced fighter system, which is able to replace the F-22 Raptor. The solicitation got here with requirements the Air Force expects corporations to incorporate of their NGAD designs.

Nonetheless, this solicitation and source-selection process doesn’t include the drone wingmen the Air Force refers to as collaborative combat aircraft, the service said.

“The NGAD platform is a crucial element of the air dominance family of systems, which represents a generational leap in technology over the F-22, which it’s going to replace,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said in the discharge. “NGAD will include attributes comparable to enhanced lethality and the skills to survive, persist, interoperate and adapt within the air domain, all inside highly contested operational environments.”

“Nobody does this higher than the U.S. Air Force, but we’ll lose that edge if we don’t move forward now,” Kendall added.

The Air Force has repeatedly said its concept for an NGAD platform won’t exactly mirror a conventional crewed fighter comparable to the F-22 or F-35, but will as an alternative be a “family of systems” that comes with a crewed aircraft component in addition to collaborative combat aircraft. Increased sensor capabilities in addition to advanced abilities to attach with satellites, other aircraft or other assets may be a part of NGAD’s family of systems.

The Air Force on Thursday said its acquisition strategy for NGAD “will invigorate and broaden the economic base to deliver rapid and revolutionary warfighting capabilities.”

Because the service develops NGAD, the statement said, it’s going to use lessons learned from other recent acquisition programs, and can use open-architecture standards. The service said this can allow it to reap the benefits of as much competition as possible throughout NGAD’s life cycle, create a bigger and more responsive industrial base, and cut down on maintenance and sustainment costs.

The Air Force said other technical and programmatic details on NGAD are classified “to guard operational and technological benefits.”

Kendall and other service officials said last 12 months they hope to begin fielding the crewed component of NGAD by the top of the last decade, with collaborative combat aircraft possibly arriving first.

In June 2022, Kendall raised eyebrows when he said at a Heritage Foundation event that the service had “now began on the EMD program to do the event aircraft that we’re going to take into production” — a remark that some took to mean NGAD was already within the engineering and manufacturing development stage.

Kendall later walked back those comments, explaining that he was using the term EMD in a colloquial sense. He said NGAD was still being designed and had not yet undergone the Milestone B review process.

Milestone B marks the purpose where a program’s technology maturation phase finishes and an acquisition program formally starts by which the service takes its preliminary design and focuses on system integration, manufacturing processes and other details ahead of production.

Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek said in an email to Defense News that when the source-selection process finishes, NGAD will go to the service’s top acquisition official — who’s now Andrew Hunter — for the Milestone B decision to award the EMD contract to the winning company.

Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin have expressed interest in pursuing the Air Force’s NGAD contract.

It’s unclear how much the contact could be value, but Kendall told lawmakers in an April 2022 hearing that every aircraft could cost “multiple” lots of of thousands and thousands of dollars, though he didn’t get specific concerning the potential price tag.