A Boeing rendering of a next-gen fighter. (Boeing photo)
WASHINGTON — The Defense Department’s Inspector General has quietly shelved a review of the Air Force’s high-profile Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) fighter program after it emerged that the service wasn’t actually as far along in development as Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall had suggested in public remarks.
The odd saga started in June 2022 when Kendall made headlines in announcing that the NGAD program had already entered the engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) phase, kicking off intense speculation about which defense prime pulled in the lucrative contract. But on Sept. 19 that year Kendall reversed himself, saying he was only speaking in a “colloquial sense” to indicate the plane was in the design process.
“I’ve been around doing this stuff for a long time, and I still think of engineering and manufacturing development as a phase in which you are working on the new design,” he reportedly said at a Defense News conference earlier in September.
Despite the walkback, later that month the DoD IG announced it was reviewing the program “to determine the extent to which the Air Force demonstrated that the critical technologies used in the [NGAD] fighter aircraft were mature enough” to enter into the EMD phase. The review was to involve “site visits as necessary.”
But then a few months after that, sometime in 2023, the IG “terminated” the review “because of other priorities at the time,” IG office spokesperson Mollie Halpern told Breaking Defense this week. She added that “[t]he project will be reconsidered in the future.” An Air Force spokesperson referred questions about the review to the IG’s office.
Whatever work was done during the review, it evidently didn’t get very far. Kendall and service acquisition chief Andrew Hunter both told Breaking Defense at the RIAT air show in July that they were unaware of the IG’s review, adding that it had no impact on the recent decision to pause work on NGAD.
“They’re doing a very quiet review,” Kendall quipped at the time.
With NGAD Reevaluation, Northrop Sees Potential Window
Like the review of the plane, the fate of the NGAD fighter itself has been thrown into doubt in more recent months as the Air Force has paused the program to reconsider its options. Kendall has maintained the Air Force will field a sixth-gen fighter, and possibly make it optionally manned. Budgetary constraints combined with fundamental questions about the fighter’s design — meant to perform across the vast stretches of the Indo-Pacific against sophisticated Chinese air defenses — have driven the service’s hesitancy, Kendall has said.
Delays with the NGAD decision have now cast considerable doubt on the prospect of awarding an EMD contract this year, a goal the Air Force established in May 2023. The contest is thought to be between Lockheed Martin and Boeing after Northrop Grumman publicly pulled out.
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Still, the reevaluation of NGAD could present new opportunities, at least according to Northrop CEO Kathy Warden. At the Morgan Stanley Laguna conference on Thursday, Warden suggested that, based on what the Air Force does, Northrop may rejoin the fray. (Boeing, Lockheed and Northrop are all separately vying for a next-gen Navy fighter, with engine primes GE Aerospace and Pratt & Whitney actively competing in both Air Force and Navy efforts as well.)
“The Air Force has taken a strategic pause on that program and are revalidating requirements and the path forward for it. If they determine that there will be a material change to the program, we would go back and reevaluate, just as we would any new opportunity, whether we think that it is a program that we’re well differentiated to perform, whether we view the business case as one that makes sense for a company and our investors, and we would look at new alternatives,” she said.
“So we’re monitoring that one.”
