Could the Boeing F-47 Fighter Soon Be For Sale? When the U.S. developed the F-22 Raptor in the 1990s, it made a clear decision: no exports, no exceptions. The idea was to protect America’s technological edge, even at the cost of interoperability and industrial scale.
The F-47 Fighter Opportunity
When the next-generation F-35 came along, Washington flipped it’s approach completely, building a sprawling multinational consortium of buyers and co-developers. The result was a program that offered allies a fifth-generation fighter – but also one bogged down by compromise, complexity, and costliness.
Now, with President Trump having officially announced the F-47 program – a next-generation stealth fighter being developed by Boeing and designed to serve as the “quarterback” of a distributed air combat system – the key question is back on the table: should the U.S. include allies and partners in this program?
My answer: yes, but selectively. Not every ally gets a seat at the table. Not this time. The U.S. should work with only the most trustworthy partners – especially those who bring serious capability or industrial value to the program. Washington doesn’t need another bloated consensus platform. What the U.S. needs is a strategically managed, high-end fighter with a tightly knit coalition behind it.
Trump’s recent reference to selling the F-47 may have sounded, to the uninitiated, like one of his usual improvisations. But this time the subject is real—and the stakes are serious. The F-47, widely understood to be the Air Force’s first operational move into the sixth-generation space, is not just a fighter. It’s a platform designed for command and control in a highly contested environment—linking manned aircraft with autonomous systems, enabling long-range sensor fusion, and dominating the electromagnetic spectrum. It’s the centerpiece of what comes next in air warfare.
Which makes the export question even more pressing.
The F-22 was kept strictly off-limits to allies – deemed too advanced and too critical to America’s technological edge to risk sharing. That decision preserved U.S. dominance in air superiority for a time, but it came with unintended consequences.
Close partners who wanted a top-tier fighter were left out, unable to buy into the program or contribute to its development. When the F-35 came along, Washington overcorrected. Rather than tightly controlling access, the U.S. built a sprawling multinational program, inviting in a wide mix of partners—some reliable, others less so. The result was a fighter built by political necessity rather than operational clarity: expensive, over-elaborate, and vulnerable to security and performance tradeoffs that came with trying to serve too many masters.
The F-47 should avoid both extremes.
We now live in a world defined not just by great power rivalry, but by multi-alignment. Even close U.S. partners are hedging – deepening economic and sometimes defense ties with China while maintaining their security arrangements with Washington. In this context, it would be reckless to throw open the doors of the F-47 program to every partner and treaty ally.
But it would be just as reckless to hoard the capability entirely.
The U.S. cannot maintain global air dominance alone. It needs a tight network of highly capable allies—states willing to invest in collective defense, contribute meaningfully to high-end warfare, and align politically in ways that matter when the pressure is on. That means countries like Japan, the UK, and Australia – nations already engaged in sixth-generation planning and with a proven record of industrial and operational trustworthiness. It may also include countries like Finland and Poland, which are spending seriously, integrating with NATO at a deep level, and taking the Russian threat seriously.
The criteria shouldn’t just be strategic alignment, but strategic value. Can a partner contribute to the fighter’s development? Can it manufacture components at scale? Can it safeguard sensitive technologies? And perhaps most important: will it stand with the U.S. in a future conflict with China or Russia – or choose neutrality?
This isn’t just about sharing a jet. It’s about forming a coalition around air defense for the next 30 years. The F-47 will likely serve not only as a fighter, but as a command node – a brain in the sky that controls drones, fuses sensor data, and fights in contested domains where connectivity and autonomy matter as much as speed or stealth. Giving a country access to that platform is a statement of trust at the deepest level.
Critics will raise legitimate concerns about technology leakage, about the risks of trusting partners who may one day drift. But those risks are manageable—through smart export controls, versioning, and continued U.S. dominance in core systems. What’s not manageable is the risk of fragmenting our alliances through over-caution and exclusion. If we deny the F-47 to every ally, we guarantee two outcomes: first, that our allies will pursue their own sixth-gen projects, reducing interoperability and increasing duplication; and second, that the U.S. will bear the burden of maintaining air dominance largely alone.
Trump’s instincts – despite his usual lack of polish – point in the right direction. He understands that the U.S. must shift from acting as a lone hegemon to leading a coalition of militarily capable, technologically advanced partners. But leadership means sharing power – selectively, not universally.
The question now is whether the F-47 will become another Fortress America project—limited to the U.S. alone – or the foundation of a new kind of collective allied airpower, leaner than the F-35 consortium but more tightly focused and better aligned to the geopolitical realities of today.
More Than Just NGAD
If Washington gets it right, the F-47 will be more than a fighter jet. It will be a test case for how the U.S. can adapt to a world in which power is contested, trust is conditional, and alliance structures must be both narrower and deeper.
The U.S. should share this platform, but only with those who’ve proven themselves worthy of it – and who can help build it better.
About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham
Andrew Latham is a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities and a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. Andrew is now a Contributing Editor to 19FortyFive, where he writes a daily column. You can follow him on X: @aakatham.
