6th Generation NGAD Fighter: The Most Expensive Ever? – For the U.S. Air Force, next-generation air dominance has a nice ring to it. Otherwise known as NGAD, who wouldn’t like a fighter plane better than the F-35 and F-22? But is it worth the high price tag? Maybe the United States should focus on buying more F-35s and ensuring that F-22s do their jobs. But the NGAD has allure. The 6th generation fighter means the latest in stealth technology, new weapons, and improved engines for supercruise ability, among other modernizations.
Is it worth hundreds of millions of dollars for each airplane? This could be up to twice as much as the F-35 and even more than the F-22’s price tag of $122 million each.
Is It Already Flying?
There have been reports that the Air Force has built a technology demonstrator for the NGAD and it is already flying. The service branch acquisition leaders say the platform is “breaking records.” But high spending is still an issue on Capitol Hill.
Air Force Leadership Believes in the NGAD
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall got an earful about these soaring costs at a House Armed Services Committee hearing on April 27, but he answered back with optimism about the NGAD based on his experience with the development of the F-22.
“It’s going to be an expensive airplane; F-22 was an expensive airplane. It was one of my aircraft in one of my earlier positions, but it’s also an incredibly effective aircraft. It’s been dominant in the air for decades now. And we expect NGAD to be the same,” Kendall told lawmakers.
Loyal Wingman Concept Means Having a Coach in the Air
Kendall said the NGAD will have an augmentation of stealth drones called the “loyal wingman” concept that are also part of the program. These are expected to be much cheaper than the manned airplane.
“We need a more affordable mix for the future,” Kendall said. “And the question is, how do we get there? And that’s one of the reasons I’m introducing the idea of uncrewed combat aircraft that are much less expensive and can be attritable, … not necessarily expendable—they’re not munitions—but they can be used at a higher rate and help populate our force structure.”
The Drones Are Force Multipliers
The drones will help NGAD pilots attain greater situational awareness and provide targeting data and intelligence and surveillance information that can be shared with the next-generation fighter and command and control airplanes.
The U.S. Navy has its own NGAD program, called the F/A-XX, and they are also not as forthcoming with budgetary line items for cost.
Can Taxpayers Look Past the High Price?
There’s much to like about the NGAD for both service branches.
NGAD artist concept from Northrop Grumman.
Image of F-35 Stealth Fighter. Image Credit: Lockheed Martin.
U.S. adversaries are forging ahead with their own new fighters and the Americans want to achieve air dominance. Still, Congress should be leery of giving the Air Force and the Navy a blank check for these two acquisition efforts. A branch secretary saying “trust me” for an aircraft that costs hundreds of millions of dollars should make policymakers take a pause. The details are also vague.
NGAD: Play Up the Positives
The “quarterback” concept of the NGAD running a flight of drones is intellectually appealing. The NGAD could stay out of range of enemy defenses and send the drones to do the dirty work in contested air space. That is something the Navy and Air Force should pursue – maybe the force multiplier notion of the airplane is more of a selling point in future back and forth with Congress. Kendall will have to go up in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee as well and he will likely receive more pointed questions about costs for the NGAD. He may want to be more specific in future hearings and media statements. The F-22 and F-35 have been expensive enough.
Now serving as 1945’s Defense and National Security Editor, Brent M. Eastwood, PhD, is the author of Humans, Machines, and Data: Future Trends in Warfare. He is an Emerging Threats expert and former U.S. Army Infantry officer. You can follow him on Twitter @BMEastwood.
Michael Byrd killed a right wing terrorist slut
May 5, 2022 at 7:32 pm
The USAF xtian crackheads just want to go back to one fighter instead of two. The Turkey-35 proves this to be a mistake as it still costs more than one F-22 each.
The Navy F-XX is shaping up to the be the F-4 Phantom to the UAF NGAD’s Starfighter.
Fenderowner
May 6, 2022 at 11:31 am
FTA: “ The NGAD could stay out of range of enemy defenses and send the drones to do the dirty work in contested air space.” So why does the design include expensive technologies Iike stealth? If the Air Force is afraid this manned platform can be neutralized by air defense systems, then drop the stralth requirement to save both acquisition and O&M costs. Unfortunately, “requirements creep” has insured that no future fighteror bomber aircraft will be affordable inthe numbers required to fulfill the USAF’s mission “to fly, fight and win – airpower anytime, anywhere.”
Chas
May 6, 2022 at 2:08 pm
Just think how many of those we could have bought with all of the money that FJB gave away to the Taliban in the form of 84 Billion dollars worth of war fighting equipment.
Tom Brown
May 6, 2022 at 3:49 pm
The problem was not in the leaving, but in the bringing
Tom
May 6, 2022 at 4:18 pm
Could this be what those F-18 pilots saw? The “UFO” that made odd position changes… Makes ya wonder. Overlay that shape on the shape in the video
Stewart Davis
May 6, 2022 at 4:30 pm
We need to stop playing this R&D+materials/# of planes produced plane cost game. The R&D is a sunk cost. Once it’s paid, it’s utterly dishonest to refer to a plane’s cost as it’s cut of the R&D cost. You don’t get the R&D cost back if you don’t make a single plane. If the plane (without R&D) costs $20M, then that’s how it needs to be referred to and treated. We throw away so many great platforms by politicizing the cost-per-plane and making it look big-and-scary, when it isn’t. The Stealth Bombers would’ve been dirt cheap if they’d bought the original 700 they planned to buy, simply because of spreading out the R&D cost per-plane. Since the R&D cost can’t be undone once it’s done, the analysis of the cost-per-plane, for whether we can afford to buy more, needs to be based on the actual cost (without R&D) of a new plane. Otherwise, we’re just throwing money away hand over fist and losing good platforms.
Frud
May 9, 2022 at 2:10 am
Here’s the thing guys. Every single iteration of fighter development is going to be the ‘most expensive’ ever. As we make them more complex, they increase in cost but that’s necessary. The alternative is to make them cheaper and less capable, then you’d be complaining about how the plane sucks. The long running joke is that eventually we’ll spend the entire budget on 1 plane. But in reality, it’s never going to be like in WW2 where we can just pump out literally hundreds of thousands of planes. Times change.