THE U.S. AIR FORCE IS CALLING A MULLIGAN on one of its most important future weapons, which was intended to replace the legendary F-22A Raptor. Originally conceived of in the late 1980s, the F-22A is still highly capable, but the service believes a new plane with new tech is necessary to dominate current and future Russian and Chinese fighters.
As a result, the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program, meant to create the world’s first sixth-generation fighter, is heading back to the drawing board. That’s because the service needs to figure out exactly what it wants from an air superiority combat aircraft in the 2030s and beyond—and how it can make such a weapon reality.
The NGAD program reboot is an example of how the slow, complicated development of modern warplanes is at odds with the breakneck pace of technological progress, which in turn threatens to lock out even the newest aircraft from state-of-the-art features.
Gen. Jim Slife, vice chief of staff for the Air Force, said the service is pondering what it’s really trying to do with the NGAD program in the first place, which begets two more questions: how does the service achieve air superiority in a contested environment, and how does the service build a manned, sixth-generation fighter?
“I mean, those are not necessarily the same question,” Slife said earlier this month at the Defense News Conference in Arlington, Virginia.
Slife’s comments followed a July announcement in which Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall announced that the service would be putting the NGAD program on pause to review its data. Now, after years of development, the Air Force is embarking on a total revamp and change of focus to exploit new technologies that have cropped up since the aircraft was first conceived of in the mid-2010s.