NGAD redesign: Air Force Secretary cracks door for unmanned option (EXCLUSIVE)

FARNBOROUGH AIRSHOW 2024 — Amid a revolution in air combat, the head of the US Air Force said Saturday he’s “reasonably confident” America’s next-generation fighter aircraft will have a pilot, leaving the door open, however slightly, for a radical departure from a fully-manned system.

“I’m confident there’s going to be a sixth-generation fighter. I’m reasonably confident that it’s going to be crewed,” Kendall told Breaking Defense in an exclusive interview over the weekend. 

That the Air Force is seemingly unsure whether the aircraft will need a pilot, and presumably a cockpit to house them, suggests the service may need to revisit even the most basic requirements for its Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) fighter, even as it had originally planned to award a contract for the aircraft sometime this year. Speaking broadly of potential changes, Kendall said it would be “reasonable” to conclude the Air Force needs to go back to do a more substantive analysis on the NGAD’s design and capability requirements.

“We’re having conversations right now about what to do and how to move forward,” Kendall said, pushing back on recent comments by Air Combat Command boss Gen. Ken Wilsbach that a down select for NGAD was likely coming in 2024. “What [Wilsbach] said is not the last word on that.”

Kendall has recently raised the prospect of serious changes to NGAD, suggesting in previous interviews that the Air Force was working to ensure the service has the right concept — and for a reasonable price. Expanding on his thinking, Kendall said a key consideration is the overall price encompassing the air vehicle and engine, noting that the powerplant is “just a piece of it” and “not by itself a big driver.”

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Floating the potential for an unmanned NGAD in the wake of his comments about the need to redesign the jet may set off alarm bells among the Air Force’s infamous “fighter mafia,” who take great pride in the service’s pilot tradition. But, analyst JJ Gertler of the Teal Group said, it is a sign that Kendall is taking a serious approach to considering all his options to avoid “driv[ing] the team in one direction or another.”

“We knew that [the Air Force was] reconsidering the design of the system; we knew that they were measuring at least twice before cutting checks. Like any good pilot, they are running through a final checklist before getting in the air,” Gertler said.

And, he wrote in email, it makes sense to at least consider an optionally-manned design because “really any modern combat air system that is not designed to be uninhabited is still optionally crewed.” 

For example, modern technology like networking and fly-by-wire controls means “it doesn’t matter where the operator is sitting. In fact, the decision to make a platform inhabited drives the design and capabilities much more than a decision to make it uninhabited. So in a very real sense, uninhabited becomes the default unless there is a reason to put a person in the platform,” Gertler said.

Air Force officials have telegraphed for years that NGAD will be expensive, with Kendall frequently using a metric of costing “multiples” of the already pricey F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. But with pressing modernization needs and ballooning costs for other critical programs, officials are now openly questioning whether their ambitions are affordable. 

“If you look at what we do in our five-year plan — that is on the Hill now — to our foundational accounts in the out years, it’s clear we did something there that’s not going to be, you know, sustainable,” he said. “We’ve got to fix that problem too. So we’ve got a number of affordability issues over the five-year plan that we had to address. And we also have to go to look at and verify, if you will, that we had the right concept [for NGAD].”

Another consideration, according to Kendall, are the facilities that underpin the fighter’s operations. “The infrastructure that’s required to support an F-22 class aircraft, if you will, leads to some vulnerabilities. Runway length, for example,” he said.

Gertler observed that judging from previous comments made by officials like Kendall, “some delay in the central airframe component of NGAD not only appears likely, but is already underway.”

“It may not have been a common practice in the past, but there’s a lot to be said for designing to include reality rather than the world as it was when you started the program or as you wish it might be 40 years from now,” he added. “A procurement schedule that doesn’t allow adaptation to changing reality won’t yield a relevant system.” 

An ‘Accumulation’ of Threats

Since the advent of the F-22 program, the Air Force’s concept for achieving air superiority has revolved around the idea of a stealthy sensor-shooter that can slip past enemy air defenses and take out threats before being detected — an operational concept the service calls “penetrating counter-air.”

Kendall said that concept hasn’t changed much since the early 1990s, when he briefed Dick Cheney, then the defense secretary, about what was considered the gravest set of threats the F-22 could face: the layered Soviet air defense systems of Syria.

But battlefields have changed in the decades since, and Kendall said the Air Force now stares down a list of Chinese threats that include increasingly sophisticated air defenses, advanced counter-stealth technologies, and new sensors and weapons built to vastly increase the range a target can be detected and destroyed.

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When asked whether a new technology had emerged that had potentially blunted the NGAD concept, Kendall characterized the growing threats as “an accumulation over time.” But he also hinted that an alternative operational concept could drive changes to NGAD requirements.

“It is natural to assume that, if you have a certain generation of something, that you’re going to go buy the next generation of that, and then it’s going to have some similar characteristics, a similar operating concept, but be better than the one you already have,” Kendall said.

“That philosophy was what drove where NGAD is headed. But we’re not up against Syria anymore. We’re not up against the Soviet Union anymore,” he said. “We’re up against China, primarily, as the pacing challenge. And we’ve got to be sure we’re doing the right thing.”

Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst with AeroDynamic Advisory, noted that the Air Force’s consternation over NGAD’s operational requirements “point to the idea that true air dominance and air superiority might no longer be feasible” – an idea further underscored by both Russia and Ukraine’s difficulty establishing sustained control of the skies throughout the war in Ukraine.

“It speaks to a world where there’s a lot more lethality, there’s a lot more diffusion of threats, and there’s less of a chance of truly obliterating the other side’s air defenses, in which case your use of resources looks very different,” he said. 

Ultimately, Aboulafia said that he believes the Air Force needs a crewed sixth-generation fighter, but the service faces a “fundamental contradiction” in its design requirements and budget that could drive delays. Affordability concerns would naturally push the service to a smaller aircraft with less range, but a more advanced Chinese threat could necessitate a larger, more capable, long-range jet that would cost more money. 

“I don’t know which is the [right option] and it’s possible that they don’t know, but if there is a redesign, it’s two very contradictory directions,” he said. 

Kendall, for his part, said NGAD is not just about the platform’s capabilities itself, but how it fits into a budding kill web that synchs up forthcoming drone wingmen known as Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), space capabilities and a new crop of weapons.

“It’s going to need to work with CCAs. It’s going to need to work in an architecture which includes space-based support and other off-board support and an architecture that uses our most advanced weapons,” he said. “So we’ve got an opportunity here to really just be careful and make sure we’re on the right path before we make the final commitment.”