The Air Force will set a new path for how it will fight air wars during the first year of the next Donald Trump presidency, which will have ramifications for decades to come.
The Air Force struggled for much of 2024 to figure out how — and even whether — to proceed with its planned sixth-generation fighter, known as Next Generation Air Dominance, or NGAD.
But NGAD’s original anticipated cost — which came in at about three times as much as an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, or in the neighborhood of $250 million to $300 million — derailed the Air Force’s plans to proceed. This summer, the service put the program’s planned contract award on hold and launched a review of NGAD, and its air superiority strategy as a whole, to find out if there is a way to achieve its goals more affordably.
The Air Force originally intended to make a decision on NGAD by the end of 2024. But in December, after President-elect Trump’s victory, the service announced it would defer that choice to the new administration.
The service sees the advanced fighter, which would replace the F-22 Raptor, as a critical part of the Air Force’s ability to fight a future war against China in the Indo-Pacific region. It would be part of a family of systems, including autonomously driven drone wingmen known as collaborative combat aircraft, and be powered by an advanced adaptive engine that could shift to the ideal configuration for its current flight conditions.
The technologies and capabilities both competitors for NGAD — widely expected to be Boeing and Lockheed Martin — are proposing are “incredible,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Dave Allvin said Dec. 7. But before the service commits itself to a course, he said, it has to make sure it’s moving in the right direction.
“We’re about to go through a one-way door,” Allvin said at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California. “Before you go through that one-way door, we thought it prudent that we look at the arc of the threat, how this [NGAD] platform integrates with the rest of the capabilities of the Air Force, and whether that integrated set of capabilities was going to meet the threat and be able to exceed the threat.”
Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., chairman of the House Armed Services subcommittee on tactical air and land forces, said the Air Force is right to ask those “tough questions” before it moves too far along on NGAD, and to give the incoming administration its chance to chart a path forward.
That will help avoid creating an NGAD platform that isn’t properly set up to tackle the threats it will face in years to come, he said.
“What’s happened in the past is, we make decisions [on platforms], and the operationalization of that capability sometimes doesn’t occur for years,” Wittman said. “By the time it gets operationalized, the threat’s changed.”
The Air Force is also putting thought into how NGAD’s platform would work with CCAs and a future tanker called NGAS, or next-generation aerial refueling system, Wittman said.
Since the election, prominent Trump advisers Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have disparaged the idea of building more crewed fighters, and said the military should instead concentrate on drones.
Crewed fighters will be necessary for the military in the near-term, Wittman said. But in the long term, he said, uncrewed platforms will take on a greater role — particularly as technology advances at a rapid pace.
“The question will always be, how does that transition take place?” Wittman said. “We are not going to go from a fleet of F-35s, B-21s, B-52s [and] F-15EXs to tomorrow, everything unmanned. … [Going] completely from crewed to uncrewed, I think, is still years in the future. But the learning curve is going to be, how do we incorporate uncrewed aircraft.”
Allvin agreed drones will play a key role in future warfare, and he feels the military needs to strike a balance between crewed and uncrewed platforms such as CCAs.
“The future is really about the most effective human-machine teaming,” Allvin said. “One can take the idea of drones or uncrewed warfare … to the extreme, and if you take the human out of this very human endeavor, which is warfare, then it becomes too easy to do. Warfare is always a human endeavor.”
Noah Robertson contributed to this report.
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.
