Lockheed Martin NGAD concept art

Lockheed Martin NGAD concept art

WASHINGTON:  One of the biggest questions about the Digital Century Series model proposed by Air Force acquisition czar Will Roper is whether the shrunken US aerospace industrial base can handle the Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program, analysts say.

“There are three or four US companies that can build an airframe, put engines in it, and add a few systems,” Richard Aboulafia of the Teal Group wrote in an analysis following Roper’s revelation in September that a “full-scale flight demonstrator” for NGAD has actually flown. “And companies are getting leaner in terms of capabilities.”

The big three primes, of course, are Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Boeing. The fourth company with the most potential, Aboulafia says, is Textron.

Another senior military aviation analyst agreed. The analyst says that aerospace companies just aren’t ready to move away from the current military acquisition model, which rewards lowest-cost bids on aircraft design in exchange for long-term profit from years (decades!) of maintaining and upgrading fighters and bombers. As Breaking D readers know, sustainment costs for Air Force fleets make up at least 70 percent of total life cycle costs.

Instead of building one sixth-generation fighter to serve 25 years, NGAD is being pursued as part of Roper’s Digital Century Series concept, aimed at pumping out fighters with new capabilities every five years or so. And, at the same time, the program would build a related family of uninhabited air vehicles (UAVs) to enable ‘teaming’ operations that provide more mission flexibility.

Roper says that the Air Force could build a series of aircraft with each optimized for a slightly different piece of the air dominance mission — i.e. one aircraft with a cutting-edge weapon system; one with a super-long range targeting system, etc. He laid out a “notional’ case for how the Digital Century model could be applied to NGAD in his Sept. 18 digital acquisition strategy guide to his workforce — 75 aircraft built every five years, based on computerized aircraft designs, called “digital twins,” from three vendors.

(The document originally was named “Take The Red Pill: The New Digital Acquisition Reality,” but the Air Force decided to rename it after realizing that the “Red Pill” meme from the seminal sci-fi movie “The Matrix” had been hijacked by a virulent online group of misogynistic white supremacists. The opening part of the title is now “There Is No Spoon.”)

Outside analysts aren’t the only ones skeptical about the program. Both sides of Capitol Hill have raised eyebrows at what they see as the lack of specificity in the Air Force’s NGAD plan. The Senate Appropriations Committee in its 2021 spending bill released yesterday cut $70 million from the Air Force’s planned $1 billion-plus budget (recommending $974 million). Further, authorizers in both the House and Senate have shaved some funds in their respective versions of the National Defense Authorization Act.

As pressure on the defense budget grows in the post-pandemic economy, Congress may be less inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to the program.

“I think a major new manned 6th-gen NGAD platform is still some time off and will likely slide even further to the right due to flat/declining budgets,” Mark Gunzinger, head of future concepts at the Mitchell Institute, says.

Aboulafia seems to be on the same page. “With a flattening budget topline (at best) and many competing Air Force investment priorities, it’s not at all clear that this program will continue. We might just be left with a museum-ready prototype,” he wrote in his September Note.

As an example of how companies are scaling back their up-front investments in new aircraft ideas, Aboulafia pointed out that Boeing is closing its NeXt future concept design activities unit. “The company also implied that there was a question mark over several other forward-looking design units and investments, including Aurora, Wisk and Aerion. … So, dreams of using a Century Series type program to keep design teams intact, and competition going in the industry, may have little hope against corporate downsizing.”

Aboulafia, a veteran aviation industry analyst, deems himself a Luddite on the hoopla surrounding digital engineering. He has serious doubts that even the startling fact that NGAD flight tests have started so soon is proof that Roper’s “digital revolution” will fix the Air Force’s long-standing fighter acquisition woes. So far, he argues, there is little to suggest that the use of digital design and engineering practices can shift the 10-year, $10-20 billion development cycle from prototype to service.

And if that is so, Aboulafia asserts, “then the Century Series concept makes no sense. Each new type would be a huge investment in time and money, with little payoff in terms of deployable warfighting capabilities.”

In making his announcement about the NGAD test flights, Roper provided few details, citing the program’s high classification.

Roper explained to reporters at the time that the proposed acquisition strategy for NGAD includes a number of options for a Digital Century Series-type buy, and has been handed over to Air Force Secretary Barbara Barrett for decision-making. “It’s a money issue,” he said. “It’ll be interesting to see how 2022 plays out.”

Asked whether Barrett has approved the strategy, given that the normal deadline for DoD to wrap its annual budget request is December, an Air Force spokesperson in an email declined to comment citing NGAD’s classified status.

What is the one NGAD airplane? As the Congressional Research Service (CRS) explains in an Oct. 5 paper, a “full scale test demonstrator” is a term that usually represents an early test-bed, as opposed to the term “prototype” that usually “indicates a more production-representative system.” Indeed, it is not beyond the realm of the possible that while new subsystems have been tested on something flying, that airframe could even be an existing one kitted out with new avionics, engines, communications suites, etc.

Further, CRS cautioned, it isn’t actually clear that the NGAD program’s goal is to build a sixth-generation fighter. “The technologies involved in NGAD are being developed to provide air dominance. Part of the program’s goal is to determine how to achieve that end, independent of traditional ideas,” CRS says. “NGAD could take the form of a single aircraft and/or a number of complementary systems— manned, unmanned, optionally manned, cyber, electronic— forms that would not resemble the traditional ‘fighter’.”

The Air Force has not revealed which companies are involved in NGAD, much less which one provided the “test demonstrator” aircraft. But as colleague Valerie Insinna reported last week, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Boeing are all currently making a killing from classified aircraft programs. While this does not necessarily mean that all of that dough is being made on NGAD (and we know those firms make a ton from classified satellites and sensors), given Roper’s “notional” NGAD acquisition strategy, it is not far-fetched to wonder if all three have been contracted to provide digital designs.

“Much of the point of Dr. Roper’s initiative is to encourage competition, and keep design teams intact, so it would make sense that all three primes would be involved,” Aboulafia said. “Given the relatively limited commitment of resources needed to build a prototype or two, it’s also budgetarily do-able to have all three involved.” He believes that the some $1.7 billion apparently spent on the demonstrator is pretty typical for fighters.