Lockheed Martin Skunk Works concept art of a sixth-generation fighter. (Lockheed Martin)
WASHINGTON — After years of development, the Air Force broke cover on its futuristic stealth fighter in May 2023 to announce that a winner would be picked to build the platform in 2024, teeing up the highly anticipated next generation of airpower.
And then reality started to set in, leading to what is perhaps the Air Force’s biggest programmatic headwind of the year: the question over whether it will field the Next Generation Air Dominance fighter at all and, if so, in what form.
[This article is one of many in a series in which Breaking Defense reporters look back on the most significant (and entertaining) news stories of 2024 and look forward to what 2025 may hold.]
The trouble started this summer, when whispers about NGAD’s fate first started swirling around Washington. Budget constraints bearing down on the Air Force — thanks to high-profile headaches like cost overruns with the nuclear-tipped Sentinel ballistic missile and pricey new programs like the B-21 Raider — began to exact their toll as the service built out its fiscal 2026 budget.
In June, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin appeared to suggest NGAD was in hot water, equivocating when asked whether the service could commit to the program. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall subsequently confirmed the stealth fighter program was on pause, and bowing to the obvious, the service announced this month that the “way ahead” for the program would officially be decided by the Trump administration.
Given the Air Force’s competing priorities, it may be tempting to view the NGAD dilemma as simply a financial one, but the issue goes deeper than dollars. Kendall, known for his motto of “China, China, China,” has frequently expressed exasperation at the scale and scope of modernization by the People’s Liberation Army. The second look at NGAD, he told Breaking Defense, has been driven in part by an “accumulation” of the threat posed by the PLA, namely through longer-range, more capable air defenses. The implied underlying question: Is a new, manned fighter the best way to keep up with America’s Asian rival?
The service’s own capabilities have also rapidly evolved, featuring tech like space-based ISR and comms, drone wingmen dubbed Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) and a budding “kill web” that threads together disparate sensors, weapons and shooters to neutralize a threat.
Any NGAD fighter is “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,” Kendall said in July. “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.”
The NGAD challenge also lies in unforgiving geography. Should American troops clash with the PLA, particularly over the Taiwan Strait, Chinese forces would enjoy a significant homefield advantage. Beijing’s burgeoning missile arsenal further threatens to lay waste to critical American installations in the region, which includes aircraft that could be caught in the crossfire while parked on the ground — creating a rift between the Air Force and Army on air base defense.
“The infrastructure that’s required to support an F-22 class aircraft, if you will, leads to some vulnerabilities. Runway length, for example,” Kendall previously told Breaking Defense.
Beyond operational implications, uncertainties around NGAD carry industrial base consequences. Though they’ve declined to raise their hands publicly, Boeing and Lockheed Martin are understood to be locked in a dogfight over the contract. A win would provide much needed relief to beleaguered giant Boeing, which has already invested billions of dollars to build up next-gen manufacturing at the company’s fighter hub in St. Louis. For Lockheed, it would extend the company’s stealth fighter winning streak after producing hundreds of now cutting edge fifth-gen F-22s and F-35s.
The same is true for engine-makers GE Aerospace and Pratt & Whitney, who are separately competing to build the NGAD fighter’s powerplant. After the Air Force passed on re-engining the F-35, the Next Generation Adaptive Propulsion effort, the program name for the NGAD engine, appears to be the only avenue left to carry revolutionary, “adaptive” powerplant technologies forward.
Ironically, the Air Force’s NGAD pause could very well prompt the Navy to go first on a different next-gen fighter. While the Air Force wrestles with its sixth-gen design, a Navy official previously told Aviation Week the sea-based service remains confident in its plans, and is still on track to award an engineering and manufacturing development contract by the end of fiscal 2025 for its own future airframe.
Though all this, Kendall has maintained he’s confident an NGAD fighter, in some form, will be built. And to that end, internal Air Force analysis now supports the development of a manned, next-gen platform, Breaking Defense previously reported. But a new administration will take over in January, where “Department of Government Efficiency” co-leads Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have both called into question current fighter procurement efforts.
What the Trump administration will do is unclear, though if history is any guide, manned fighter jets may be here to stay for at least one more generation. Like the flying car, the death of the manned fighter has been predicted for decades, but neither have come to pass.
