The US Air Force is desperate to salvage its new sixth-generation stealth fighter – and it should be. The fast, stealthy Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) aircraft could be critical in any future war with China, according to one expert.
“Moving away from NGAD could be perilous,” Dave Deptula, a retired USAF general who flew Boeing F-15 fighters, wrote for Breaking Defense.
As recently as last year, the Air Force was fully committed to NGAD – and planned to spend tens of billions of dollars developing and building as many as 200 of the supersonic jets through the 2030s. But then the cost of almost everything else the Air Force was trying to acquire rose – in particular, Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth fighters and new nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles – placing the NGAD effort in jeopardy.
Last month, Air Force officials hedged. Maybe they’d delay or even cancel NGAD in the next budget cycle. “We’re going to have to make those choices, make those decisions, across the landscape,” General David Allvin, the USAF chief of staff, said at an aviation industry event in early June.
In strictly fiscal terms, Allvin’s ambivalence made sense. The plane slowly emerging from the NGAD program’s design phase threatens to be very, very pricey. With its sophisticated sensors, radar-evading stealth, novel engine design and compatibility with a new class of high-performance drone “wingman,” each NGAD jet could cost $300 million, USAF secretary Frank Kendall told Defense News recently.
That’s more than three times what an F-35 costs. “It’s a very expensive platform,” Kendall said. “We can only afford it in small numbers.”
Reducing those numbers could bring down the overall cost – but only somewhat. Research and development costs are the same whether the Air Force buys 200 NGAD planes or just 100. And cutting airframes actually increases the per-unit manufacturing costs by reducing economies of scales on the purchasing of parts.
And besides, if the Air Force is going to replace its approximately 180 Lockheed Martin F-22s without cutting whole squadrons from the force structure, it’s going to need close to 200 NGADs.
So maybe the cost savings come from a redesign. Defense News drew attention to the jet’s cutting-edge “adaptive” engines, which would change shape to alter airflow. Rather than two air streams, as seen on current turbofan engines, an adaptive engine would have three. The third air stream could be directed into the engine core stream, boosting thrust for the highest speeds, or alternatively it could be put into the “bypass” stream to give greater fuel efficiency and cooler exhaust – useful for making the fighter’s infrared signature more stealthy.
An adaptive engine has already been developed for the F-35, but the US forces declined to use it, at least in part because it could only be fitted to the Air Force’s F-35A runway jets. US Navy F-35C tailhook planes and US Marine F-35B jump jets would have required a different design, so the services decided to go with a common upgraded engine that could be used by all three fleets.
Right now, the Air Force is counting on the NGAD program to drive the move to adaptive propulsion. If the service dialled down its ambitions, perhaps accepting an engine only slightly more sophisticated than the F-22’s powerful Pratt & Whitney F119, it might shave tens of millions of dollars off the price of each NGAD – and still deliver the world’s most capable fighter.
“The way you do that is if you can reduce the complexity, but also the size of the engine,” Kendall said.
The way ahead is unclear even as the Air Force tries to convince the US Congress to let it retire around 30 of the oldest F-22s as a cost-saving measure – a proposal Congress has rejected, for now. The next big decision point comes sometime next year, as the Air Force begins mulling its budget proposal for 2026.
A year is a long time and a lot could change, especially given the political tumult in the United States and the possibility that convicted criminal Donald Trump might win the presidency in November. Trump has repeatedly professed his admiration for the authoritarian regimes in China and Russia. No one knows for sure what kind of foreign policy he might champion in a second term.
But if the Air Force continues planning for an apocalyptic confrontation with the Chinese air force over the western Pacific Ocean, it’s going to need NGADs, Deptula stressed. Especially in a long war like the one that has been raging in Ukraine for more than two years.
“Friendly forces have found target lists growing, and called on more and more forces,” Deptula wrote. “If that happens over the Taiwan Strait, the US could find itself ‘back to the future’ with the requirement to roll back defenses and gain access so joint forces can win a longer slog. An NGAD plane could be very useful indeed as the war drags on.”
