The Air Force is requesting nearly $3.5 billion in FY’26 to continue work on the F-47, a sixth-generation fighter under development by prime contractor Boeing. According to budget documents released Thursday, the allocation includes $2.6 billion in discretionary funds and $900 million from the GOP-led reconciliation bill currently under debate in Congress.

In contrast, the Navy’s sixth-gen fighter program known as the F/A-XX, would receive just $74 million in R&D funds — 84 percent less than the $454 million the service received in fiscal 2025. The decision comes after the Navy already delayed around $1 billion for F/A-XX in FY’25 due to spending caps imposed by the 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act.

“We did make a strategic decision to go all-in on F-47,” a senior defense official told reporters during a Pentagon briefing Thursday. The move was prompted “due to our belief that the industrial base can only handle going fast on one program at this time, and the presidential priority to go all-in on F-47 and get that program right, while maintaining the option for F/A-XX in the future,” they added.

President Donald Trump announced that Boeing had beat out Lockheed Martin for the F-47 contract in March, ending a months-long pause to the program’s selection process caused by budgetary and design concerns. The aircraft is envisioned as a long-range crewed fighter jet that will replace the Air Force’s fleet of F-22 Raptors and is expected to field sometime in the 2030s.

The F-47 platform is the centerpiece of the Air Force’s future Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) family of systems, which also includes robotic wingman drones called Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA). Budget documents indicate that the CCA program would receive a total of $807 million in FY’26, with a majority of those funds coming from $678 million added in the reconciliation bill.

Similarly, the carrier-based F/A-XX is expected to feature longer ranges, enhanced stealth capabilities and be more survivable than the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet it will eventually replace. After Lockheed Martin dropped out of the competition earlier this year, Boeing and Northrop Grumman are both vying to lead the program.

While budget documents at press time did not disclose the specific work planned for the F/A-XX in the next fiscal year, the funding would allow the Navy to “preserve the ability to leverage F-47 work” and prevent “over-subscription of qualified defense industrial base engineers,” the senior defense official said.

The details provided by budget documents end months of ambiguity over the sea service’s plans for the F/A-XX. After Trump’s dramatic rollout of the Air Force F-47 contract award in March, reports surfaced that the Navy would follow suit and name the prime contractor for its sixth-gen fighter the same month.

But that announcement never came, and subsequent reports from Reuters and Bloomberg indicated that funding disputes and industrial base concerns had delayed the program — potentially by three years.

The Navy’s decision to once again scale back funds to F/A-XX is likely to spark ire among lawmakers, many of whom have recently pressed service leadership to move the program forward.

“I’m concerned that any hesitancy on our part to proceed with the planned procurement of the sixth-gen fighters for the Navy will leave us dangerously outmatched in a China fight. We cannot wait,” Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Calif., said in May during a House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense hearing with Navy leadership. “Further, we cannot expect to grow the industrial base by undermining aviation programs that rely on highly specialized supply chains and skilled labor that cannot be turned on and off like a switch.”

Ultimately, the final decision on the F/A-XX program’s fate is under discussion by Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Trump, a senior defense official told reporters Thursday. When asked whether the Pentagon was considering to create a joint Air Force-Navy program — repeating the F-35 Lightning II acquisition model — the official said “pretty much everything is under consideration to get the tactical air capability that our warfighters need as quickly as possible.”

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The tests represent a critical milestone for the CCA program, which is part of the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) family of systems. The drones are expected to fly alongside the service’s manned platforms — including the sixth-gen F-47 fighter jet — to conduct a range of missions and augment the organization’s aircraft fleet. The ground tests bring the two vendors one step closer to conducting first flights of their drones, scheduled for sometime this summer.

“This phase bridges the gap between design and flight, reducing integration risks, boosting confidence, and laying the groundwork for a successful first flight and eventual fielding to the warfighter,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin said in a statement.

The upcoming ground test phase will include “rigorous evaluations” of both vendors’ prototypes, according to an Air Force statement. The tests will focus on the platforms’ propulsion, avionics, autonomy integration and ground control segments to “validate performance, inform future design decisions, and prepare the systems for flight testing later this year.”

After receiving contracts in 2024 for Increment 1 of the CCA program, General Atomics and Anduril completed critical design reviews of their prototypes last fall. The Air Force in March designated the platforms as the first-ever unmanned fighter aircraft, with General Atomics’ prototype dubbed the YFQ-42A and Anduril’s Fury platform now referred to as the YFQ-44A.

“The CCA program represents a groundbreaking new era in combat aviation, and we remain on schedule to test and fly YFQ-42 in the coming months,” General Atomics President David Alexander said in a statement. “Our work on YFQ-42 will further expand the field of unmanned aviation, and we remain excited for the future.”

Air Force leadership have touted the service’s rapid and flexible approach taken with the CCA program, as it plans to field systems in increments. A competitive production decision for Increment 1 is expected in fiscal 2026, with the first batch of drones planned for fielding sometime before 2030.

“Together, Anduril and the United States Air Force are pioneering a new generation of semi-autonomous fighter aircraft that will fundamentally transform air combat,” Jason Levin, Anduril’s senior vice president of air dominance and strike, said in a statement. “By delivering YFQ-44A at unprecedented speed, we are ensuring that warfighters have ample opportunity to experiment and build the trust required to support operational fielding of CCAs before the end of the decade.”

While General Atomics and Anduril are developing Increment 1 CCA platforms, the Air Force is separately working with five unnamed vendors that are developing the autonomy software for the first batch of drones.

Meanwhile, the service intends to begin development of the next batch of CCA drones, known as Increment 2, during fiscal 2026 to expand mission applications and integrate emerging technologies.

In recent months, Joseph Kunkel, director of force design, integration and wargaming at the Air Force Futures organization, has suggested that future CCA increments could feature a range of options in terms of cost and capabilities — including some attributes that aren’t considered “exquisite” in order to keep price tags low.

Along with initiating ground tests, the Air Force announced Thursday that the CCA drones will be based at California’s Beale Air Force Base, which has been designated as the CCA Aircraft Readiness Unit (ARU).

“The mission of the ARU is to provide combat aircraft ready to deploy worldwide at a moment’s notice. CCA are semi-autonomous in nature so the ARU will not have to fly a significant number of daily sorties to maintain readiness,” the service said in a statement. “The aircraft will be maintained in a fly-ready status and flown minimally so the number of airmen required to support the fleet will be substantially lower than other weapons systems.”

Updated on May 1, 2025, at 3:40 PM: This story has been updated to

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Troy Meink — who worked at the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) prior to his nomination — also told lawmakers that the department must move faster on innovating new technologies, while also improving acquisition processes for onboarding new capabilities.

“One of the first things I plan to do is take a holistic look at all the modernization and all the readiness bills that we have coming. And then I will put together and advocate for what resources I think are necessary to execute all of those missions,” Meink said Thursday during his confirmation hearing with the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Both during his testimony and in responses to advance policy questions prior to the hearing, Meink emphasized that the Air Force is at an inflection point as it works to upgrade key systems and capabilities across all of its core mission areas.

The service is responsible for modernizing two legs of the nuclear triad with its new B-21 Raider stealth bomber and its replacement for the aging Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile system known as the LGM-35A Sentinel. Other high-cost efforts include the Air Force’s next-generation fighter platforms — such as the F-47 and Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) drones — new command-and-control capabilities and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) systems.

Managing those efforts with ongoing readiness and maintenance requirements would be his top priority — and a significant challenge — if confirmed, Meink told lawmakers.

“We also need to balance today’s requirements with the need to modernize and maintain future readiness, deterrence and lethality,” Meink wrote in his written responses to lawmakers’ questions. “Manage short-term risk to readiness to modernize and prepare our forces for mid-to-long term and enduring strategic missions as well as acute and persistent threats.”

Meink also pledged to improve the Air Force’s ability to innovate on new technologies for warfighters, adding that his previous experience at the NRO and in other leadership positions at the Pentagon would help him do so.

“I spent the last decade increasing competition and expanding the industry base, which has significantly accelerated delivery capability and at a lower cost. I intend to bring that same drive for innovation to the department,” he said.

Prior to being tapped by Trump in January to serve as the next secretary of the Air Force, Meink spent four years as principal deputy director of the NRO — the spy agency responsible for intelligence space systems. He was also previously the organization’s director of geospatial intelligence systems and held numerous other positions focused on the space domain.

Meink said growing the Space Force would be among his top priorities if he’s confirmed.

“Space is critical. This is actually one of the areas that we’re most challenged, I believe,” Meink said in response to questions from Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb. “From the rapidly evolving threat from China and others — both the direct threat to our systems, as well as the threat those systems pose to operations across the department in general.”

However, Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., probed Meink on rumors that the Space Development Agency (SDA) is planning to cancel contracts for Tranche 2 and Tranche 3 of the transport layer in the Proliferated Space Warfighter Architecture (PWSA) and instead award a sole-source contract to SpaceX for its Starshield capability. Cramer added that, if true, such plans would mean at least eight mid-sized space vendors would not be allowed to bid on the contracts.

Meink’s alleged ties to Elon Musk’s SpaceX have come under scrutiny in recent weeks, but the nominee claimed that he was unaware of any considerations to replacing current contracts with Starshield but would investigate them if he’s confirmed.

Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and York Space Systems are on contract to build some of the satellites under the Tranche 2 transport layer, while a separate contract previously awarded to York and Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems is being re-competed following a protest bid. The agency is currently gearing up to formally begin bidding for Tranche 3 of the transport layer this year.

“One of the things that I’ve pushed for — particularly over the last 10 years — is to expand competition and expand the industry base,” Meink said. “That ends up almost always with the best result, both from capability and cost to the government.”

In a statement to DefenseScoop, a Department of the Air Force spokesperson said the department and the Space Force are working with the Office of the Secretary of Defense to review all acquisition programs under the fiscal 2026 budget process, and that no decision has been made regarding Tranche 2 and Tranche 3 of the transport layer.

“The DAF and [Space Force] are committed to the efficient use of taxpayer dollars and maximizing the delivery of capability to the joint warfighter,” the spokesperson said. “We look forward to sharing the status of our acquisition programs with our stakeholders in Congress and elsewhere when the FY26 budget is delivered in the coming months.”

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Boeing beat out Lockheed Martin for the contract of the platform — which will be designated as the F-47, President Donald Trump announced during a press conference held in the Oval Office. Northrop Grumman was also in the running to develop the NGAD platform until 2023, when the company publicly announced it was exiting the competition.

The Air Force did not share how much Boeing received for the award due to classification of the program. The service is now on a path to field the NGAD platform sometime in the 2030s.

“The F-47 will be the most advanced, most capable, most lethal aircraft ever built,” Trump said. “An experimental version of the plane has secretly been flying for almost five years, and we’re confident that it massively overpowers the capabilities of any other nation.”

The NGAD contract is a critical win for Boeing and revitalizes its stealth aircraft business. The company has bet billions of dollars in standing up advanced manufacturing facilities at its fighter production hub in St. Louis, Missouri, where the legacy F/A-18 Super Hornet line is expected to end in 2027.

The award also gives Boeing a much-needed boost after its other defense programs — such as the KC-46 Pegasus aerial refueler and new Air Force One jets — have racked up billions in financial losses.

“We recognize the importance of designing, building and delivering a 6th-generation fighter capability for the United States Air Force. In preparation for this mission, we made the most significant investment in the history of our defense business, and we are ready to provide the most advanced and innovative NGAD aircraft needed to support the mission,” Steve Parker, interim president and CEO at Boeing Defense, Space and Security, said in a statement.

The sixth-generation fighter jet is intended to replace the F-22 Raptor and is envisioned as a long-range crewed aircraft equipped with advanced sensors and weapons payloads designed to operate in highly contested environments in the Indo-Pacific.

Lockheed Martin’s loss marks an end to the defense giant’s relative monopoly in the stealth fighter manufacturing business. According to a report from Breaking Defense, the company is no longer vying for the Navy’s sixth-generation fighter jet program known as the F/A-XX because its proposal did not meet the service’s criteria.

The F-47 platform is the centerpiece to the Air Force’s NGAD family of systems concept, which also includes the service’s future loyal wingman drones known as Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) and other advanced command-and-control technologies. The aircraft will be powered by an engine being developed under the Next Generation Adaptive Propulsion (NGAP) program — another ongoing competition between GE Aerospace and RTX subsidiary Pratt and Whitney. 

Chief of Staff of the Air Force Gen. David Allvin said Friday in a statement that over the last five years, the service has been flying X-planes for the F-47 aircraft to test future concepts and proving out its technology. He noted that the experimental work will allow the NGAD aircraft to fly sometime during Trump’s administration.

“With the F-47, we are not just building another fighter — we are shaping the future of warfare and putting our enemies on notice,” Allvin said. “This platform will be the most advanced, lethal, and adaptable fighter ever developed — designed to outpace, outmaneuver, and outmatch any adversary that dares to challenge our brave Airmen.”

The announcement comes after the Air Force decided to pause the selection process for the NGAD platform last summer to reevaluate the service’s design concept against predicted threat environments, as well as attempt to lower the platform’s cost. The service initially planned to award the NGAD contract before the end of last year, but ultimately decided in December to push the decision to the Trump administration.

During the pause, former Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said the service was “taking a hard look” at the platform’s design to ensure the stealth fighter jet would be able to address new and emerging threats. China’s arsenal of advanced weapons and NGAD’s survivability on large airfields were some of the elements considered during the evaluation, he said.

In a statement, Allvin said “the F-47 has unprecedented maturity. While the F-22 is currently the finest air superiority fighter in the world, and its modernization will make it even better, the F-47 is a generational leap forward. The maturity of the aircraft at this phase in the program confirms its readiness to dominate the future fight.”

Budget constraints also influenced the service’s decision to pause NGAD’s selection process. Original estimates for the sixth-gen aircraft were predicted to be around $300 million per unit, but Kendall said last year his ideal price point would be similar to the F-35 Lightning II — about $100 million, depending on the variant.

Allvin said in a statement that the F-47 will have a lower price tag than an F-22 — which has a unit cost of around $143 million. The Air Force requested $2.7 billion for the platform in its budget request for fiscal 2025, indicating that it planned to spend $19.6 billion on the aircraft over the next five years. 

“Compared to the F-22, the F-47 will cost less and be more adaptable to future threats — and we will have more of the F-47s in our inventory,” Allvin said. “The F-47 will have significantly longer range, more advanced stealth, be more sustainable, supportable, and have higher availability than our 5th generation fighters.”

Updated March 21, 2025, at 2:35 PM: This story has been updated to include a statement from Steve Parker, interim president and CEO at Boeing Defense, Space and Security.

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The two services have discussed how to keep their sixth-generation aircraft — the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) platform and F/A-XX, respectively — complementary, but they’re running two separate programs that feature different airframes and propulsion systems.

As they continue development work on the different aircraft, Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., said the Air Force and the Navy should consider areas of joint collaboration — similar to the Pentagon’s acquisition strategy for the F-35 Lightning II.

“I would ultimately like to see — and I’ve stressed this to the Air Force and the Navy — that when we consider what we’re going to build next is [to] do what we did with the F-35, with a caveat to that,” Kelly said Saturday during a meeting with reporters during the Reagan National Defense Forum. “I think it helps if we can jointly build whatever the next system is. I think that would be a positive thing.”

He didn’t elaborate on the “caveat” that he was contemplating.

The F-35 fifth-gen fighter jet was born from the Joint Strike Fighter program, an effort to develop a single family of aircraft to replace a range of legacy platforms for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps — as well as for select international partners. The plane has multiple variants but all share the same basic design, avionics system, stealth technology and single-engine configuration.

The comments from Kelly come after the Air Force on Thursday announced it would defer a decision on the NGAD platform to the upcoming Trump administration. The service originally planned to award a contract for the aircraft by the end of 2024, but decided to pause the program’s selection process earlier this year due to risks posed by budget uncertainty and advancements in new technologies.

Meanwhile, the Navy is marching forward on its own sixth-gen fighter — currently known as the F/A-XX. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti told reporters in October that the sea service was in the process of source selection and is still committed to fielding the aircraft in the 2030s.

In a recent interview with Aviation Week, Rear Adm. Michael Donnelly, director of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations’ air warfare division, emphasized that the F/A-XX is independent of the Air Force’s NGAD. Notably, the sea service’s aircraft will feature a different airframe and leverage a derivative-type engine — as opposed to the Air Force’s adaptive-cycle jet engine technology being developed through the Next Generation Adaptive Propulsion (NGAP) program.

When asked about the differences, Kelly said that the two services “should sit down and talk about it.”

As for NGAD, Kelly acknowledged that the Air Force made the right decision to pause the program and decide the best way to move forward, especially considering how quickly adversaries are developing new capabilities that can better detect and destroy U.S. military systems. 

“These high-value assets are going to be held at risk. And how are we going to best deal with it? Maybe it is a sixth-gen fighter,” he said. “I think some of this technology has advanced very quickly, so I do agree with the secretary of the Air Force that it is appropriate to kind of take a pause here and figure out what direction we should go.”

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“The Secretary of the Air Force will defer the Next Generation Air Dominance way ahead decision to the next administration, while the Department of the Air Force continues its analysis and executes the necessary actions to ensure decision space remains intact for the NGAD program,” DAF spokesperson Ann Stefanek said in a statement Thursday.

Over the last few months, the Air Force paused the selection process for the NGAD platform in order to reexamine the service’s design concept to ensure it fits anticipated threat, budget and technology environments. The stealth fighter jet is intended to replace the F-22 Raptor, and would be the centerpiece of the NGAD family of systems.

The Air Force plans to extend current contracts for technology maturation and risk reduction on the program “to further mature designs/systems while ensuring the industry teams remain intact,” Stefanek said. The service initially planned to award an NGAD contract before the end of 2024.

The department is also asking industry partners to update their proposals, taking into account delays caused by the program’s pause, she added.

Lockheed Martin and Boeing are thought to be the two prime contractors vying for the project.

NGAD has been one of Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall’s key priorities during his time at the helm of the department. After months of uncertainty, Kendall said the service will need to make a final decision on the program ahead of releasing its budget request for fiscal 2026 — which will now be developed by officials appointed by President-elect Donald Trump.

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During AFA’s Air, Space and Cyber conference last week, Air Force leadership doubled-down on its intent to field next-gen capabilities, including a sixth-generation fighter jet and bomber, accompanying loyal wingman drones and a modern tanker. After months of uncertainty and conflicting public statements, the service acknowledged that it’s taking a number of external factors into consideration as it reevaluates its plans.

But while nothing is currently set in stone, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall emphasized during his keynote speech at the conference that the service will have “simultaneous and well-supported answers” about its future aircraft programs in the coming months.

“We are looking at what we need in order to achieve air superiority in a manner consistent with the increased threat, the changing character of war in the most cost- and combat-effective way,” Kendall said.

NGAD paused

Earlier this year, Air Force leadership began suggesting it was having second thoughts on its plans to acquire a a new stealth fighter jet — known as the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) platform. 

Kendall confirmed to reporters at the AFA conference that the service has halted the selection process for NGAD in order to reexamine the Air Force’s current design concept and ensure the platform is right for future threat, budget and technology environments.

The aircraft was initially designed to replace the F-22 Raptor fighter jet, and is envisioned as a long-range crewed platform equipped with advanced capabilities that can operate in highly contested environments. Kendall said NGAD’s current design as an F-22 replacement is several years old, and a number of new factors have come into play since it was first developed.

The pause isn’t expected to last more than a few months, he added.

Kendall has tapped a team of advisors led by his special assistant, Tim Grayson, to oversee the NGAD platform’s reevaluation in a context that considers emerging technologies and the service’s other future aircraft.

One point of consideration is the Air Force’s plans to conduct more disaggregated forms of air superiority, which is both the main mission for the F-22 and the intended one for the NGAD system.

During a panel at the conference, Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Jim Slife noted that in the past, the service would design a single platform with specific requirements and capabilities — such as size, range and thrust — so that it could execute a specific mission set, such as air superiority.

“We’ve gotten to a point now where our systems-level integration, we have the ability to disaggregate these capabilities and look at air superiority more broadly than just, ‘Hey, we have to build a platform to do a thing,’” Slife said.

The Air Force is already moving down a path of proliferating its capabilities more broadly on the battlefield, especially with its in-the-works drones known as collaborative combat aircraft (CCA). However, the concept “puts into question the design concept that we’ve been working on” for the NGAD platform, Kendall said. 

“It’s a fairly mature design concept, and … it’s an F-22 replacement. You can make some inferences from that,” he added. “The CCAs are about air superiority first and foremost. As we go forward, I expect there’ll be a strike aspect of CCAs as well, but initially we’re focused on air superiority and how to use the CCAs in conjunction with a crewed aircraft to achieve air superiority.”

Both the NGAD platform and CCAs are considered part of the next-generation air dominance family of systems, and thus closely connected during their respective development processes. The Air Force planned to have the NGAD aircraft and its fifth-generation fighters available to fly alongside the loyal wingman drones as a way to augment and extend capabilities of manned platforms.

According to Kendall, how much the Air Force can harness autonomy for both its fighter jet and CCA drones is part of the larger NGAD evaluation.

“We’re looking at a range of alternatives, and crewed versus uncrewed is one of the things we’re thinking about. … I believe that we’re probably going to do one more version of a crewed, more traditional aircraft. I don’t know exactly what that aircraft will look like yet,” Kendall said. “It’s design to make it able to control CCAs effectively and fight with CCAs — I think is a question mark. Whether there’ll be variants that might be crewed or uncrewed is another question mark.”

Kendall also emphasized that once fielded by the 2030s, armed CCAs will have to be under strict oversight by the manned fighters operating them — meaning they will require line-of-sight communications.

“We’re not going to have aircraft going out and doing engagements uncontrolled. So the default, if they lose communications, would be for them to return to base, which takes them out of the fight,” he continued. “So we don’t want that to happen. And when they do engagements, we want them under tight control.”

At the same time, the Air Force is trying to wrangle in the unit cost of the NGAD platform so that the service can field the aircraft in high-enough numbers to deter adversaries. For Kendall, an ideal price point for NGAD would be around that for the F-35 Lightning II fighter jet.

“I’d like to go lower, though,” he said. “Once you start integrating CCAs and transferring some mission equipment and capabilities functions to the CCAs, then you can talk about a different concept, potentially, for the crewed fighter that’s controlling them. So there’s a real range in there.”

Original estimates for the sixth-gen aircraft were around $300 million per plane, about three-times as much as what an F-35 costs today. Air Force acquisition chief Andrew Hunter later told reporters during a roundtable at the conference the service is looking to create a more affordable NGAD design concept, noting it may not come at the cost of an F-35 in the end.

As for what the intended output of the NGAD pause will be, such as a new request for information (RFI) or request for proposals (RFP), Hunter said that depends on what answers the Air Force finds in its analysis.

“There’s different possible points of optimization. If those points are very close to where we already are, there may not need to be a huge change in our approach. If they are not close, there will have to be a significant change to our approach,” he said.

Next-gen tanker and acquisition

As the Air Force mulls over NGAD, it’s also moving forward on another future aircraft program known as the Next Generation Air-refueling System (NGAS), while also testing out a new acquisition model that focuses on mission systems separately from the platforms themselves.

NGAS is a tanker that’s supposed to be designed to refuel other aircraft in more contested environments than today’s systems can. The service recently released an RFI for the platform’s mission systems as a way to establish a vendor pool for the program early, while also giving industry an early opportunity to help inform the Air Force’s requirements formation process, Hunter said.

“It’s not, ‘Hey, we’re going to pick one of you to be in charge of something for the next several decades.’ It’s about creating a pool of talent, if you will, a pool of industry capability that we will continuously access and continuously work with over time to achieve the objectives of delivering a capability, delivering a system,” Hunter said during a panel discussion at the AFA conference.

Focusing on mission systems first rather than the NGAS airframe was another intentional move by the Air Force, he later told reporters. The service is trying to pivot away from decades-old acquisition strategies where a single prime contractor is responsible for nearly every part of an aircraft program.

Instead, the department wants to buy aircraft mission systems separately moving forward as part of what Hunter referred to as the “next-generation acquisition model.”

One element of the new strategy includes engaging with industry early on in the process, while another “is having direct relationships, where it makes sense and where we can, with our mission system providers,” Hunter said. “The reason why is, your mission systems have to integrate across a broad swath of our force in order to accomplish the missions that we have to do, the complex mission threads that go into high-intensity conflict with a peer competitor.”

Another RFI for the NGAS airframe will come after the Air Force finishes conducting an analysis of alternatives (AOA) for the platform by the end of 2024, which will give insights into what its future aerial refueling needs will be and how quickly the new system can be developed.

The analysis will also inform the Air Force’s plans to purchase an interim tanker that will help bridge the gap between the service’s current fleet of air refueling platforms and the future NGAS, which is expected to be fielded in the mid-2030s, Hunter said.

Speaking to reporters during a roundtable at the AFA conference, head of U.S. Transportation Command Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost emphasized the importance of fielding NGAS as quickly as possible to prepare for future conflicts.

She noted that initial insights into the AOA are not surprising, and cover how the tanker will fly in contested environments, the need for low visibility, and concepts of operations for refueling both manned and unmanned platforms.

“I’m hoping that as NGAS AOA comes out and we are able to expose all those technologies, that no matter the platform, I can start getting those technologies as soon as possible,” Van Ovost said.

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The contractor is partnering with the service and the two vendors competing in the ongoing development-for-production phase of CCA Increment 1 to incorporate the weapons onto the drones, Jon Norman, Raytheon’s vice president of air and space defense systems requirements and capability, said during a meeting with reporters Tuesday. News about plans to equip the uncrewed systems with the missile was first reported by Air and Space Forces Magazine in July.

“We’ve been working with the Air Force with their collaborative combat aircraft, and they’re integrating that onto the [Increment 1]. They’re still in the early requirements phase for CCA [Increment 2],” Norman said. 

Part of the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) family of systems, CCA drones are intended to fly alongside the service’s fifth- and sixth-generation manned aircraft in the future. The department intends to rapidly produce the uncrewed platforms to begin testing them in operations before the end of the decade.

The Air Force is planning to design and field the systems in increments in order to gradually iterate and improve their capabilities. Service leaders have said the unmanned aircraft will carry a range of equipment in order to accomplish multiple missions — from intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) to offensive strike.

Norman said the Air Force has set the AIM-120 as “a threshold weapon” for the drones.

“Now you can have a controlling aircraft — whether that’s an [F-35 Lightning II] or an [F-22 Raptor] — that can use those collaborative combat aircraft as a force extender, so they have more munitions available,” he said. “With the collaborative combat aircraft, now it has a platform out there that’s in the right position, survivable, and it can employ AMRAAMs guided and directed by the F-35 or by the F-22.”

In April, Anduril and General Atomics were awarded contracts to create detailed designs, manufacture and conduct flight tests for the first batch of CCAs, known as Increment 1. Once the service nails down its preferred design, the two companies — as well as any other vendors interested — will be able to compete for the final production contract expected to be made in 2026.

The service will display full-scale models of both company’s prototypes during AFA’s Air, Space and Cyber conference in September, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said Tuesday during the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Aerospace Summit.

Raytheon has spent significant time redesigning the missile to add improvements in range, navigation and anti-jamming technology. Although the company did not share which specific variant of the AMRAAM is being integrated onto the CCAs, the range of the newest variant — the AIM-120D — is estimated to be around 100 miles.

Norman said the contractor is currently preparing for a round of tests under the Air Force’s Weapon System Evaluation program to further demonstrate the AMRAAMs range for extended shots. The company didn’t alter anything with the missile’s propulsion system, but changed how it flies for long-range shots so that it has more kinetic energy when it hits targets, he explained.

“What that does is it brings us back into parity, and we actually exceed a lot of the capability of all the pacing threats worldwide. So, it makes AMRAAM kind of future-proof,” Norman said.

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Part of the service’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) family of systems, the CCA drones are intended to fly alongside the Air Force’s fifth- and sixth-generation platforms and augment its manned aircraft fleet. The goal is to develop a system that is a fraction of the cost of crewed platforms and can be quickly built in large quantities on flexible timelines.

The service awarded Anduril and General Atomics contracts in April to develop the air vehicles for the first operational systems known as Increment 1, and it’s concurrently developing requirements for the follow-on Increment 2 platforms. Meanwhile, the Air Force is also working with five vendors on a separate contract to develop the mission autonomy for CCAs.

And while the program is moving forward, a report published by CSIS on Tuesday highlighted that the service’s existing acquisition culture could still turn the CCA drones into platforms that are too expensive and exquisite to produce, potentially inhibiting the Air Force’s ability to field the systems in a meaningful number before the end of the decade.

“Over the next few years, Air Force program managers will encounter lots of tempting opportunities — and perhaps even pressure from Congress — to make the CCA design slightly better performing for (supposedly) slightly more money and a slightly slower schedule,” noted the report — titled “The Defense Department’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft Program: Good News, Bad News, and Unanswered Questions.”

Greg Allen, director of CSIS’s Wadhwani Center for AI and Advanced Technologies and co-author of the report, said that although uncrewed aircraft can have a lower price tag than manned aircraft — due to them carrying less equipment — adding exquisite sensors and having low production capacities may crank up the price of some drones — such as the RQ-4 Global Hawk, which can cost $130 million or more per unit.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has previously estimated the unit cost for CCAs will be around $25-30 million, with the intent to field at least 1,000 platforms. While that is about one-third of the cost of an F-35 Lightning II fighter jet, it is also near the price point for F-16 Falcons currently sold to U.S. allies and partners, according to the report.

“What U.S. strategy needs are assets that it can comfortably put at risk for the mission. And exquisite, expensive stuff is really difficult to risk,” Allen told DefenseScoop ahead of the report’s publication. “So the question here is, are we really thinking about the optimal design space in terms of the tradeoff between cost and performance?”

CCAs are expected to have a modular design that allows them to perform a range of functions, including offensive strike, electronic warfare and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR). Even though those mission sets will require additional equipment, Air Force leadership have publicly asserted they are trying to prevent unnecessary cost growth stemming from additional requirements.

“The Air Force already has expensive, high-performing fighter aircraft like the F-35. The point of the CCA is to be cheap, rapidly built, and numerous,” the CSIS report stated. “This is not to say that the Air Force should tolerate lousy work on the part of its industry partners but merely that cost and schedule must always be kept firmly in focus.”

At the same time, Allen noted that current conversations around the price tag for CCA and other programs focus on sacrificing capability to produce cheaper platforms. The report highlights that cost models commonly used by the Air Force and other government organizations often don’t account for alternative pathways or innovative production methods that can improve cost efficiency without jeopardizing performance and schedule.

For example, early assessments by NASA and the Air Force found that SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket development would cost nearly $4 billion to build. In reality, a subsequent NASA review determined the Falcon 9’s development cost was just $400 million.

“I think there’s also just a lot of slack in the defense industrial base, and an opportunity to improve costs there,” Allen said. “The strong existence proof there is SpaceX, which showed up and started with a very modest capability at a very cheap price, and then delivered a pretty exceptional capability still at a very cheap price.”

The CSIS reports cautions that the Air Force’s cost modeling for its fighter aircraft could become complacent, as well. It urges the service to not concede to a CCA price tag of $25 million or more before considering new approaches to reduce the program’s cost.

One concern could be relying too much on military-specific equipment that can only be produced by a small number of companies, Allen said. Waiting on long-lead items to deliver for months or even years could create delays in CCA deployment.

“A ramification of that is a lot of aircraft sitting in the factory 95 percent finished and unable to fly because of that lingering 5 percent, which would be a really, really lousy outcome,” he said.

Despite the potential for future delays and cost growth, the report largely praised the Air Force’s work on CCAs — emphasizing that it is the first real program of record at the Defense Department for an autonomous system. The Air Force is also devoting time to additional questions related to operational doctrine, infrastructure, training and lifecycle sustainment through an Experimental Operations Unit for the program, the document noted.

The service’s budget for the program is another key indicator that CCAs can move out of the “science project territory” that many new capabilities get stuck in and become an actual operational system, the report stated. According to its budget request for fiscal 2025, the Air Force plans to spend more than $6 billion on the CCA program and related projects over the next five years.

The report also points to the service’s acquisition approach — specifically its decision to give industry less stringent requirements to promote innovative designs, as well as the choice to divide the contracts into one lane focused on hardware and another on software.

Even though it might not work for every brand new capability, the approach is appropriate for CCAs given the current state of the defense technology industrial base, Allen said.

“You’ve got a really weak competitive landscape, just in terms of there either being a monopoly or a near monopoly,” he said. “The hardware side of that equation has really high upfront investment costs … If you’re trying to improve the competitive landscape in the DOD, software is a really nice starting point because, while it is expensive, the upfront costs are much lower so it’s easier to encourage new entrants into the ecosystem.”

In addition, the authors noted the importance of the Air Force’s Autonomy-Government Reference Architecture (A-GRA) in creating standards for vendors writing software and adding new capabilities, as well as ensuring CCAs will be interoperable with other platforms across the Defense Department. 

The report emphasized the importance of the award to Anduril, a nontraditional contractor backed by venture capital. The contract serves as a positive signal to those who may be considering investments in companies developing capabilities for the Pentagon, which could give a boost to the overall defense tech ecosystem, Allen said.

There are still some unanswered questions related to CCAs, such as whether they should be classified as an autonomous weapon system. It’s also unknown if the cutting-edge platforms will be enough to deter or defeat China’s growing military technology strength.

Nevertheless, Allen said he believes the success or failure of the program will influence other autonomous system efforts across the Defense Department.

“The fact that we’ve got a flagship program of record in a military service — and with an approach that other services appear ready to emulate — I think this is the turning point in the entire DOD for autonomy,” Allen said. “If this program goes well, I think that will be an accelerated turning point. And if this program encounters a lot of trouble, I think the overall shift will also encounter a lot of trouble.”

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“I’m absolutely confident we’re still going to do a sixth-generation crewed aircraft,” Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said during a keynote speech at the Air Force Life Cycle Industry Days. “There’s a chance it might be uncrewed, but I think that’s not quite ready yet. And we could always do something like an optionally crewed platform.”

Kendall added that the service is taking a “pause” on development of the NGAD aircraft over the next few months to review the platform’s design before nailing down its final requirements, confirming previous comments that the Air Force was re-evaluating the program due to a number of external factors.

The Air Force intends to “take a hard look” at the system to ensure the stealth fighter jet has the right design and that the service is on the right track to address new and emerging threats, Kendall said. China’s arsenal of advanced weapons — including cruise, ballistic and hypersonic missiles — and the platform’s survivability on large airfields are some of the elements officials are considering, he noted.

“We want to make sure we get the right concept,” he said. “We’re going to take a little bit of time to make sure we do before we make the major commitment — that’s the biggest commitment of any development program, which is to start design and development for the project.”

Kendall first hinted at the possibility of an unmanned NGAD aircraft last week in an interview with Breaking Defense. But his comments Tuesday suggest the Air Force isn’t entirely confident that autonomous capabilities are ready to be integrated onto the fighter jet. 

Much of the department’s effort to develop autonomy has focused on the collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) program. The drones are intended to fly alongside the service’s manned fighter fleet to augment the force with additional capacity and capabilities.

In May, Kendall flew in a F-16 Falcon modified with autonomous flight capabilities to assess the technology’s maturation in a real-world demonstration. The flight was part of the Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program, a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency effort to develop autonomous flight technology.

However, he noted that the technology wasn’t the exact operational capability the Air Force needs right now.

“That technology is maturing very quickly, and we’re going to get it into our cockpits as quickly as we can. We’re going to get it into CCAs as quickly as we can, and I think we’ll have a much more formidable integrated capability when we do that,” Kendall said.  

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