Lockheed Martin Skunk Works concept art of a sixth-generation fighter

Lockheed Martin Skunk Works concept art of a sixth-generation fighter

WASHINGTON: Air Force acquisition czar Will Roper’s novel acquisition strategy for the Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program has been approved by service leaders, just in time for the DoD 2022 budget. But the decision may be too late to stave off a congressional whack to the current $1 billion request, much less convince lawmakers to bump up funding in 2022.

“Department of the Air Force leaders have endorsed NGAD’s acquisition strategy, and are receiving regular updates on the program’s progress,” an Air Force spokesperson told me in an email. “The DAF and DoD are evaluating the capabilities, timelines, and costs during the normal planning and programming process for FY22 and beyond.”

Instead of building one sixth-generation fighter to serve for 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. After months of study by acquisition staff and outside advisors, Roper offered an acquisition strategy to Air Force Secretary Barbara Barrett in early September — around the same time he announced the first NGAD flight tests.

“Back during World War II … we were building a fighter every two-and-a-half years. Since I’ve been in the Air Force, there’s only been a handful: F-22, F-35, F-15E. Those are three fighter aircraft in, really, about 30 years that we built, and we’ve only retired the F-4 and the F-117,” lamented Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Brown in a presentation to the Chicago Council on World Affairs today.

Echoing his Accelerate Change or Lose vision document, Brown stressed that the service needs to be able to move much more quickly on new capabilities. “We’ve got to figure out how to do this in the future to be able to compete against our adversaries,” he said.

According to Roper, 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. And, at the same time, the program would build a related family of uninhabited air vehicles (UAVs) to enable ‘teaming’ operations with piloted fighters to provide more mission flexibility in heavily contested air space. 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.

Up to now, Congress have been skeptical. Lawmakers on both sides of Capitol Hill have complained that there isn’t enough detail about NGAD plans to justify the Air Force’s 2021 budget request, which includes $1.5 billion for fiscal year 2022 and some $7.3 billion over the Future Years Defense Program (FYDP). Congress also remains skeptical of Roper’s passionate argument, articulated to reporters back in July, that the concept of rapid aircraft evolution embedded in the Digital Century Series is necessary “to stabilize, at least for tactical aircraft, the collapse of our aviation industrial base any further.”

Senate appropriators last Tuesday clipped $70 million from the NGAD request in their 2021 spending bill. The HAC version of the bill chopped the request in half, cutting $507 million — despite strong push back from the White House Office of Management and Budget in a July 30 heartburn letter.

Slide provided by Mitchell Institute’s Mark Gunzinger

“I think experts on the Hill aren’t convinced on Digital Century Series for three reasons: it doesn’t provide force structure for the Air Force, the business case is a naïve bet on out-year operating cost savings – that’s an act the Hill has seen before, and it never pays off,” Rebecca Grant, founder of IRIS Independent Research, tells me in an email. “And finally, it’s premised on a colossal misunderstanding of the R&D environment of the 1940s and 1950s that gave rise to the original Century series.”

“They also know the main driver was dislike of the F-35 program. Not the jet, the program,” she added. As Breaking D readers know, prime contractor Lockheed Martin has a history of struggles with the program, including with the disastrous planning and maintenance software system, called ALIS.

“Given the cuts proposed by both the SAC and HAC, the odds are good that NGAD will not get its full request for FY21. But more importantly, it shows that the Air Force still had not fully sold the Congress on its acquisition approach and why it needs a 6th generation fighter right now while it is still ramping up procurements of 4th and 5th generation fighters,” Todd Harrison, a defense and budget expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), says in an email today.

Indeed, a number of air power advocates have expressed concern that the NGAD/Digital Century Series concept might eat into Air Force procurement of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter without resulting in tangible improvements to capability in the near- to mid-term.

“A 6th gen NGAD aircraft will be needed in the long run, but not at the expense of building out the USAF’s 5th gen fleet, buying the B-21, recapitalizing the tanker force, and fielding the [Advanced Battle Management System], said Mark Gunzinger, director of future concepts for the Mitchell Institute.

Gunzinger’s analysis has flagged a couple of key risks to the Digital Century idea. For one, a series of derivative aircraft could reduce cost and time to develop the next variant, and, in the end, not actually be any cheaper. Further, Gunzinger and a number of analysts have argued that small production lots increase unit procurement costs. Indeed, the F-22 fighter was cancelled in part due to its stratospheric unit costs, which in part resulted from a drastic reduction to the number of aircraft the Air Force originally deemed as required.

And, as I reported last week, the big three aerospace firms — Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Boeing — may not be ready to accept that they can make enough profit from a acquisition model that would see DoD paying upfront for design, production and life-time costs of the aircraft, as opposed to today’s model where the real money is made on long-term support, upgrades and maintenance of the fleet and follow-on foreign sales.