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$300 Million a Fighter? How the Air Force Plans to Control NGAD Costs

China's White Emperor 6th Generation Fighter Mockup.
China's White Emperor 6th Generation Fighter Mockup. Image Credit: X Screenshot.

What You Need to Know: The US Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program aims to maintain air superiority but faces soaring costs, with estimates for the manned fighter reaching $300 million per unit.

-To reduce individual aircraft costs, the Air Force is exploring a “family of systems” approach, integrating Collaborative Combat Aircraft (drones) and satellites to handle tasks traditionally performed by the fighter.

-This could transform the NGAD fighter into a command and control platform, similar to the E-3 AWACS, directing drones and leveraging data from a network of sensors. While the overall system cost may remain high, this approach could make NGAD more adaptable and resilient.

NGAD: Can the Air Force Build a Next-Gen Fighter Without Breaking the Bank?

The United States Air Force faces a significant problem: the future of air superiority is unaffordable

The service, stung by sticker shock over cost projections for its future fighter, is trying to tamp down costs while ensuring the end product will dominate the aerial battlefield of the future. 

The inspiration for such a formidable aerial killer may come from one of the Pentagon’s most important but entirely unarmed aircraft. 

Maintaining Air Superiority

Air superiority is the United States Air Force’s foundational mission. It is the mission that enables all others: without control of the skies, even just temporary control, close air support, deep strikes, airdrops, and flying unarmed support aircraft becomes a risky proposition.

Air superiority also protects U.S. forces operating in other domains. As the Air Force often points out, the last time U.S. Army ground troops were killed by manned aircraft was in April 1953, more than seventy years ago.

As a result, the Air Force typically spared little expense for the air superiority mission. Over the last fifty years the Air Force operated both the F-15 Eagle and the F-22 Raptor, world-beating fighter jets that have consistently outperformed their adversaries.

However, the F-22, nearing its third decade of service, now faces competitors from China and Russia, like the Chengdu J-20 and Sukhoi Su-57, two aircraft built to counter the American jet. In anticipation of the F-22’s retirement, the Air Force started work on a new fighter, Next Generation Air Dominance, in 2014.

In 2020, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Will Roper announced the service had designed, built, and flown an NGAD prototype in just one year. 

Now, in 2024, the Air Force is at a crossroads. Estimates on the per-unit cost of NGAD have ranged as high as $300 million, or about the same as four F-35A Lightning II fighter jets. Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall paused the program to consider alternatives, at one point suggesting NGAD could even end up costing less than a F-35A.

But how does that happen? 

NGAD: The True Cost of a Next-Generation Fighter

A world-beating, sixth-generation fighter jet for less than a F-35 is a daunting proposition, but recent technological advances may make it possible.

The solution is to offload many of its capabilities to other systems, including drones, sensor satellites, and communications satellites. The resulting aircraft could prioritize artificial intelligence over armament and networking over dogfighting. 

NGAD was always described as a “family of systems,” with a manned fighter at the center, supported by unmanned aerial drones. The jet-powered, high-performance drones, known as Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), will be capable of a variety of missions, including carrying additional weapons, sensors, and jammers and even acting as decoys to lure enemy planes and missiles away from the manned fighter. This functionality would connect via secure datalinks relaying data between manned and unmanned craft. 

Under this scheme, NGAD begins to look less like a fighter and more like a command and control aircraft, with the pilot taking in intelligence and sensor data and then assigning CCAs to perform tasks. Artificial intelligence would assist with mission planning, threat updates, and feeding data downstream to the CCAs and upstream to air battle commanders. An unlikely but apt comparison is to the E-3 Sentry airborne early warning and control system (AWACS).

The unarmed E-3, based on the Boeing 707 passenger liner, has a crew of up to twenty-three. Although unarmed, the E-3 is often described as the quarterback of the air battle, taking in data on enemy air movements from its AN/APY-2 radar and sending piloted fighters to intercept. 

A cheaper NGAD would max out the family of systems, leaning heavily on the individual capabilities of drones and satellites. NGAD could end up a variant of the F-35 Lightning II optimized for range, supported by the Next Generation Aerial Refueling System, a stealthy tanker concept the Air Force is pursuing. The entire NGAD program would likely not end up cheaper—as capabilities are transferred to supporting systems, so would go the cost.

An early NGAD concept might have been a $300 million aircraft flanked by two $30 million drones. A new NGAD concept might be a $100 million aircraft accompanied by two $60 million drones and $130 million towards a shared constellation of satellites designed for long-range aircraft detection and data relays. The total system cost is roughly the same, but Congress might find individual costs more bearable. 

Making the CCA drones more capable is also useful from a technological standpoint. Drones are cheaper and faster to develop than manned aircraft, making it easier to replace older models with newer ones featuring the latest tech. They are also faster to build than crewed aircraft, making battle losses more easily replaced.

This could help NGAD fend off obsolescence, as a manned fighter in service for thirty years could see three or more generations of CCAs come and go throughout its service life. 

The Air Force has an unenviable task in getting the NGAD concept right: how to balance both capabilities and cost in a time of extraordinary technological change.

Even worse, it must now factor in China and Russia as pacing threats. A failure to place the right bets will imperil America’s air superiority advantage and give adversaries time to catch up.

About the Author: Kyle Mizokami 

Kyle Mizokami is a writer on defense and security issues and has been at Popular Mechanics since 2015. If it involves explosions or projectiles, he’s generally in favor of it. Kyle’s articles have appeared at The Daily Beast, U.S. Naval Institute News, The Diplomat, Foreign Policy, Combat Aircraft Monthly, VICE News, and others. Kyle is also a Contributing Editor for 19FortyFive. He lives in San Francisco.

Written By

Kyle Mizokami is a defense and national-security writer based in San Fransisco. His work has appeared in Popular Mechanics, Esquire, The National Interest, Car and Driver, Men's Health, and many others. He is the founder and editor for the blogs Japan Security Watch, Asia Security Watch and War Is Boring.

2 Comments

2 Comments

  1. bobb

    January 17, 2025 at 4:23 pm

    The USA will never get to see the NGAD become a reality.

    This is because the aircraft needs engines that can’t be produced in time for it to fly with and so someone will have to cancel the project.

    The money saved will be spent on the critical LGM-35 project which is something nobody will cancel because it is vital for fighting the final world war.

    Without the LGM-35, the USA could turn into a land of carrion-eating critters and a landscape filled with smoking ruin after being hit by a deluge of rockets from the vast western pacific.

  2. Gerry

    January 19, 2025 at 5:28 pm

    If we can’t afford it, or the sentinel as bobb stated, we lose.

    The end.

    There is no more super power USA.

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