Following a troubled flight testing campaign, the Air Force decided not to include any funding to procure ARRW in its budget request for fiscal 2025. At the time, officials said it would take time to fully analyze and understand data gathered during the test campaign before fully committing to putting more money toward the system’s development or fielding.

But comments made by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin on Thursday suggest the service has resolved to continue funding the ARRW program rather than end it.

“I will tell you that we are developing — and you’ll see in the budget submission, assuming it’s what we put forward — two different programs. One is a larger form factor that is more strategic [and] long range that we have already tested several times — it’s called ARRW,” Allvin said during a House Armed Services Committee hearing.

Developing hypersonic missiles has been a top priority for the entire Defense Department as U.S. adversaries continue to mature their own technology. The weapons are able to reach speeds of Mach 5 or higher and are highly maneuverable in-flight, making them difficult for air defense systems to intercept.

And while the Air Force, Army and Navy each have respective hypersonic missiles development programs, all of the weapons so far have yielded mixed results during flight test campaigns.

After a successful all-up-round test for ARRW in late 2022, the Air Force conducted three additional tests in 2023 and a final one in 2024 — but declined to share any results, casting doubt on whether all objectives were met during the campaign.

In 2023, then-Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall admitted to lawmakers that ARRW’s second test in March of that year was deemed unsuccessful. As a result, he said the service intended to reevaluate the program as it finished flight tests, but would shift focus to its other hypersonic missile program, known as the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM).

Furthermore, a 2024 report from the Pentagon’s weapons tester revealed that ARRW’s test campaign was also challenged by a lack of available infrastructure and insufficient means to collect critical flight data. 

Now, both ARRW and HACM are “continuing to develop and moving beyond [research, development, test and evaluation] and getting into the procurement range in the very near future,” Allvin told lawmakers Thursday.

Under development by Lockheed Martin since 2018, ARRW is a boost-glide missile that uses a rocket booster to reach hypersonic speeds, meaning the weapon is large and can only be launched via very big aircraft like the Air Force’s B-52 Stratofortress bomber.

On the other hand, HACM is a smaller, air-breathing scramjet hypersonic missile that is compatible with more aircraft, including fighter jets. RTX was tapped to develop a prototype design for HACM in 2022, and the service was expected to conduct at least 13 tests between October 2024 and March 2027 before production decisions are made, according to the Government Accountability Office’s annual Weapon System Assessment report released last year.

“The Air Force plans to transition HACM to the major capability acquisition pathway at either development start or production start in 2027, depending on what capabilities the Air Force is willing to accept and whether production facilities are ready,” the GAO report stated.

The Air Force declined to provide additional details regarding ARRW’s fate until the FY ’26 budget is approved.

Lockheed Martin deferred specific questions to the Air Force, but a spokesperson told DefenseScoop that the company “has full confidence in the maturity and production readiness of ARRW hypersonic-strike capabilities. We continue partnering with the U.S. Air Force to meet the urgent needs of our warfighters.”

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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 directive — first reported by Air and Space Forces Magazine — was issued Thursday and effectively puts several plans under the so-called Reoptimizing for Great Power Competition already in motion on hold, including work on standing up an Integrated Capabilities Command and Space Futures Command. The order will not require actions already taken under the effort to be reversed, the spokesperson said.

“The planning pause remains in effect until a Senate-confirmed Secretary and Under Secretary of the Air Force are in place and have the opportunity to review the initiatives,” the DAF spokesperson told DefenseScoop in a statement. “The Department of the Air Force welcomes the opportunity for our new leaders to assess all ongoing actions and ensure compliance with DoD directives. We will issue clarifying guidance, as necessary.”

Spearheaded by then-Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall and unveiled in February 2024, the Reoptimizing for Great Power Competition is a broad plan to reorganize the department to prepare the Air and Space Force’s readiness and warfighting capabilities for potential conflict with U.S. adversaries. The initiative included a list of 24 near- and long-term efforts, such as department reorganizations and new commands.

Among those action items included the creation of an Integrated Capabilities Command (ICC), which would create a single organization for generating requirements for new warfighting capabilities. The service announced in September that it had created a “provisional” ICC as it worked to stand up a complete office.

The Space Force is also set to get a new field command — dubbed Space Futures Command — that would focus on evaluating future threat environments, validating warfighting concepts and conducting data-driven analytics on mission area designs. The Department of the Air Force had previously stated that they would stand up the new command sometime in 2025.

Other efforts that were underway include the elevation of Air Forces Cyber, reorganization of Air Force Material Command and more. Meanwhile, preparation for the service’s major exercise known as Resolute Force Pacific will not be affected by the pause order, according to an Air Force spokesperson.

“Exercise Resolute Force Pacific (REFORPAC), which will assess the Air Force’s readiness to operate in a contested, dynamic environment against high-end threats, is not impacted by the Secretary of Defense’s recent order to temporarily pause planning. This exercise, a first of its kind since the Cold War, is intended to test the Air Force’s ability to move large amounts of people, equipment, and resources into the Pacific theater at speed and scale. REFORPAC is well-aligned with the Department of Defense’s priorities of enhancing warrior ethos and credible deterrence,” the spokesperson said.

The fate of the Department of the Air Force’s reorganization efforts must wait until new leadership is confirmed by Congress. Those confirmation hearings have not yet been scheduled. President Donald Trump nominated Troy Meink, current deputy of the National Reconnaissance Office, to serve as the DAF’s next secretary. Matthew Lohmeier, who previously served as a Space Force lieutenant colonel but was relieved from his post in 2021, has been tapped to serve as the DAF’s undersecretary.

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In a congressionally-mandated report submitted to lawmakers in December and set to be published Monday, Kendall outlined his prediction on what security environments and technological advancements will contribute to what both the Air and Space Forces will look like in the year 2050. The document covers a broad range of emerging capabilities that will shape future warfare, many of which are underpinned by an expanded use of AI and autonomy.

“It is likely these areas of advanced military technology will be manifest through the increasingly widespread use of autonomy and automation, in all domains, but especially in space, in cyberspace, and in the air,” Kendall wrote in the report, titled “The Department of the Air Force in 2050.”

The assessment comes at a critical inflection point for AI and autonomy, especially their use by the Defense Department as it looks to counter emerging threats from adversaries such as China and Russia. During Kendall’s tenure at the helm of the DAF, both the Air and Space Forces have made strides in leveraging the technologies — from using artificial intelligence to assist personnel in day-to-day tasks to the development of the Air Force’s robotic wingmen known as Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA).

As the technology proliferates in the coming decades, Kendall believes the department’s greatest challenge will be understanding what the right mix of manned and unmanned capabilities will be for specific warfighting functions.

“The hardest thing, I think, for us to come to grips with is going to be the human-machine interface and how the decision making takes place,” Kendall said Monday during an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We’re going to have to figure out how to manage this in a way which is cost effective, which is consistent with our values [and] which is militarily competitive. I think that’s going to be a tough problem to solve.”

Kendall predicted in the report that AI-assisted decision making and support tools will be at the center of many military functions and capabilities by 2050. In particular, he highlighted that AI will likely inform battle management platforms to quickly inform mission planning and also help extract relevant target identification and tracking information from multi-sensor databases.

“Victory or defeat in the air or in space at the human scale is likely to be determined by which combatant has fielded the most advanced AI technology in the areas most crucial to achieving victory,” Kendall wrote.

At the same time, autonomous systems will likely become even more common in warfare by 2050 than they are today in Ukraine and the Middle East, Kendall noted. While space systems have always carried a significant degree of autonomous capability, aerial platforms and weapons are also expected to operate with less human intervention.

The Air Force is on a path to introduce more intelligent autonomous systems into the force with its planned fleet of CCA drones, expected to fly alongside the service’s manned fighter jets to conduct various missions. Contractors General Atomics and Anduril are gearing up for first flights of their respective Increment 1 CCA prototypes in 2025, and the Air Force is already in planning stages for the follow-on Increment 2.

Kendall said at CSIS that he expects the Air Force to use a mix of manned and unmanned platforms “for a long time” — pushing back on recent comments made from tech titan and top Trump advisor Elon Musk that urged the U.S. military to stop buying manned aircraft. 

“We’ve got to think through the command and control, and I think for the foreseeable future crewed fighters are going to be managing the formation that includes CCAs,” Kendall said.

Introduction of more autonomy and artificial intelligence will also require a significant culture change within the Department of the Air Force, which is another battle all in itself, Kendall noted.

“The culture and the history and the legacy of the Air Force, which I have been steeped in — particularly for the last few years, but also for my whole life — really is about the role of the pilot,” he said. “Letting go, to some degree of that, I think is an incredibly difficult, emotional thing for people to do.”

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The center, headquartered at Scott Air Force Base, Illinois, was stood up in 2019 and was responsible for delivering cyber capabilities. The recently announced change making it a field operating agency that is secretariat aligned will require no movement of people, and it’s expected to reach full operational capability by October 2025.

“This is a significant step toward streamlining and consolidating Information Technology functions and ensuring unity of effort in IT service delivery across the Air Force and Space Force,” Frank Kendall, secretary of the Air Force, said in a statement. “By combining and aligning these functions to their authoritative owner, the IT enterprise will be able to produce capabilities in shorter, more rapid development cycles — ensuring requirements are expediently actioned and delivered to the Airmen and Guardians who need them.”

As a field operating agency, the center will develop and manage services such as cloud computing, cybersecurity, mobility, and data centers, to ensure interoperability and consistency across the department, according to a LinkedIn post from the Department of the Air Force CIO.

The move — which was effective Dec. 20, according to a release — is in line with Kendall’s ongoing effort to reoptimize the DAF for great power competition, a sweeping set of changes overhauling how the service is organized and creating new commands as it transitions from 20-plus years of counterterrorism operations and focuses on countering advanced adversaries such as China.

As part of those changes, the Air Force has sought to elevate the role of cyber and IT functions, with forthcoming moves including elevating Air Forces Cyber and splitting the intelligence and cyber roles at the deputy chief of staff level. The latter change aims to elevate the role of IT, cyber and warfighter communications with a dedicated three-star general serving as the chief advisor to the secretary.

“The bifurcation of IT did not meet my intent to rapidly deliver capabilities based on the requirements provided by our people,” Kendall said.

The evolution of the Cyberspace Capabilities Center, which will include the realignment of functions from other organizations and future administrative changes, will more effectively organize, train and equip the IT enterprise and cyber personnel, according to the Air Force.

“Our men and women are used to change, but we’re especially excited about this opportunity to refocus our mission centered around service delivery for the enterprise. We can already see the synergies building between our team and the DAF CIO’s staff,” Col. Chris Rubiano, Headquarters Cyberspace Capabilities Center commander, said in a statement. “We look forward to onboarding other Enterprise IT functions from across the Department and working with stakeholders to grow processes which help us best develop capabilities for both Airmen and Guardians.”

The move also aims to align with the Air Force’s notion of “one department, two services,” since the inception of the Space Force in 2019, with the need to better represent the structure among both entities.

“Many people don’t realize how vast our office’s statutory authority for IT is — there are many responsibilities that my office cannot delegate and that we are responsible for delivering and synchronizing across the Enterprise, which is inclusive of all IT — from business, to warfighting, to intelligence, to services of common concern,” DAF CIO Venice Goodwine said in a statement. “I have a responsibility to the secretary, but also his staff and both services, to ensure their IT requirements are captured and developed in a way that is not only responsive but cost effective and interoperable with one another. We can do this through effective governance, and alignment of the Cyberspace Capabilities Center as a Field Operating Agency to my office, will help reinforce adherence to the capability delivery process.”

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“The place where I think we should be moving faster is counterspace. We need to protect the joint force from the targeting and sensing that China, in particular, is fielding now,” Kendall said Thursday during a webinar hosted by the Mitchell Institute. “And we need more effective and efficient ways of sending a single interceptor against a single satellite.”

Counterspace weapons are capabilities able to disable, destroy or disrupt space capabilities through physical, electronic or cyber means. Although the U.S. has kept details about the types of counterspace weapons it has in development or deployed behind closed doors, the Defense Department has routinely sounded alarms over adversary capabilities — such as China’s work on anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons.

Kendall acknowledged that the Department of the Air Force has done significant work to identify ways to address the problems posed by enemy counterspace capabilities but warned that much more needs to be done.

In its budget request for fiscal 2025, the Space Force allocated $37.4 million in research-and-development funds towards at least two counterspace systems. The first is the offensive Counter Communications System, a mobile electronic warfare device able to block adversary satcom signals. The second is the defensive Bounty Hunter system, which will geolocate satellite communications and detect electromagnetic interference on radio frequencies from allies and adversaries.

As Kendall prepares to depart from his role as secretary of the Air Force, he said there has been “very good progress” made in the last four years in initiating development and fielding for other space-based capabilities.

“We’ve largely moved to more resilient architectures, distributed communications [and] distributed missile warning,” he said. “We’re looking at sensing, we’re looking at [ground-moving target indication] capability moving there.”

With a new administration and leadership coming to the Pentagon when President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January, Kendall emphasized the importance of prioritizing development of key space capabilities — including satellite communications, sensing, targeting and missile warning.

“Increasingly, we’re moving capabilities into space,” Kendall said. “The joint force is going to be very dependent upon space, and I think, quite frankly, the Space Force and space capabilities are going to be decisive in a future conflict, particularly with a peer competitor.”

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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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NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — The Air Force is moving away from a platform-centric view of electronic warfare to more of a system-of-systems approach as it revamps its EW arsenal.

The service has been a platform-centric organization historically — meaning it has relied on systems such as aircraft to perform both its mission and contribution to the joint force — but the modern electromagnetic spectrum environment and threat landscape are demanding a new paradigm.

“Most of our electronic warfare programs are platform centric, so there wasn’t a unifying focus on this area as a whole. My own experience suggested that this is a historically neglected area that can have oversized impact, but doesn’t compete well in our internal budget battles relative to other priorities,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said last week at AFA’s Air, Space and Cyber conference.

The Air Force — much like the rest of the U.S. military — has been on a multi-year journey to modernize its outlook on electronic warfare, with officials acknowledging the airborne electronic attack mission for years was driven primarily by the Navy. Similar to other services, at the end of the Cold War it divested in many of its advanced capabilities, such as the venerable EF-111A Raven. Now, the Air Force has set off on a journey to reinvigorate its EW approach and capabilities.

Those at the AFA conference were encouraged by the attention electronic warfare is now getting at top levels of the service after years of neglect.

“I am excited with the direction the Air Force is going,” David Gaedecke, senior executive advisor at Booz Allen Hamilton, said in an interview.

Gaedecke, a retired two-star general who prior to retiring most recently served as vice commander of 16th Air Force, led the service’s major study over six years ago, known as the Enterprise Capability Collaboration Team, that sought to dive deeper into electromagnetic spectrum issues and develop reforms. That study led to clear changes that the Air Force has implemented, such as new organizations and commands.

“We went from an ECCT at the direction of chief of staff of the Air Force … to yesterday, where I’m sitting in a suit in a room and I’m listening to the secretary of the Air Force and I knew how important the [operational imperatives] were and then for him to say, ‘Hey, there’s four other things that I need to focus on, and the two I’m going to mention today are mobility and EW,’” Gaedecke said. “I was like, that alone is progress. I mean, that’s significant progress that the secretary of the Air Force is on the stage acknowledging that, because we all know that. Everybody heard him say it. That matters.”

Kendall and other officials described how the service has added electronic warfare as a cross-cutting enabler for its seven operational imperatives, undergoing a study associated with that effort. As a result, the Air Force is trying to utilize a more holistic approach to EW that takes into account other tools and capabilities beyond just the aircraft it flies.

Officials said the new Integrated Capabilities Command — which will work on operational concepts, new requirements and modernization plans so commands can focus on warfighting – and Integrated Capabilities Office — which is focused on improving acquisition — will play a huge role in the future when it comes to disaggregating electronic warfare from platforms and getting to a place where the right capabilities are used for the right missions.

“Having that type of functionality and those people taking a look to how we counter any type of adversary data links, communication … part of the data links, obviously, cyber systems, intel, surveillance — all of those type of things to counter that effectively with offensive EA has to be a collaborative effort,” Brig. Gen. Leslie Hauck, director of the electromagnetic spectrum superiority directorate within the A2/6L, said in an interview at the AFA conference.

There are space and cyber capabilities that can be utilized to defeat what officials call “kill webs” from the adversary, enabling tools that involve communications systems and networks that contribute to finding a target, tasking a weapon and engaging that target kinetically or non-kinetically.

“The rule and prominence of electronic warfare in the war in Ukraine provided additional incentives. What the team discovered was incredibly important. We believe we can counter advanced adversary kill webs by integrating a combination of electronic warfare tools, operationalized cyber capability and other elements. I’m excited to see us making fast progress on this mission area for the Department of the Air Force,” Kendall said.

He later told reporters at the conference that electronic warfare also extends to space and vice versa, noting that officials identified “very promising” technologies through the cross-cutting operational enabler study over the last year. Although Kendall said he couldn’t provide much detail given the classified nature of the effort, he suggested the department is looking at integrating cyber and electronic warfare together for greater effect.

Some sources indicated the Air Force’s emerging cyber-enabled air superiority concept — the service’s attempt to build its own tactical cyber capabilities separate from U.S. Cyber Command and focused solely on Air Force missions — will play a role here.

“There are a number of things that I think offer a lot of potential for us that we’re trying to explore. I think writ large, you can expect more emphasis on electronic warfare going forward,” Kendall told reporters.

Others noted that in order to affect adversary kill webs, the Air Force must shift to a system-of-systems approach vice a platform approach.

“When we look at collectively, the pacing threat China, it’s all about kill chains. It’s about enabling the blue kill chain, it’s about disrupting the red kill chain. And [in] the future fight you can’t just do that with a platform-centric view,” Joshua Niedzwiecki, vice president and general manager of electronic combat solutions at BAE Systems, said at the conference. “We’re excited that with the ICC and things like the Integrated Capability Office, there now becomes a mechanism for us to look at the problem differently and integrate capability across multiple platforms and multiple systems … Today everything is spec’d and designed in a platform-centric way, and so the requirements are defined for each platform. What that creates as a bit of a gap is the ability to leverage capability and to drive costs down across platforms.”

He noted his hope for the ICC is there’s a mechanism to push alignment across various platforms and capabilities.

It all comes down to reducing costs and getting the biggest return on investment for the Air Force.

“EW traditionally has been an area that has had a little bit of trouble competing with platforms and weapons and other things, but it’s incredibly important on the battlefield. As the war in Ukraine is showing, that’s becoming even more so,” Kendall told reporters.

Hauck explained that when the service engages with industry, requests are based on which part of the kill chain is most beneficial that will allow the military to win and to dominate across kinetic and non-kinetic warfighting realms, emphasizing it is a cross-cutting, collective effort.

“Back to the return on investment, so that then we can go to the Office of [the] Secretary of Defense and DOD writ large and show that we’ve got a good plan collectively to spend money in the right places, that’s really what it allows us to do,” he said of these new organizations the Air Force is creating that will seek to bring a more collaborative approach between industry, acquisition officials and operators.

Doing more with less

Currently, the Air Force has a limited number of dedicated electronic attack aircraft. The revamped Compass Call — now designated the EA-37B, outfitted to a Gulfstream G550 business jet as opposed to the EC-130H — was only just delivered to Davis Monthan Air Force Base, Arizona, in August to begin pilot training. While extremely capable, this platform will become a high-demand, low-density asset given the limited number of aircraft and budget constraints.

Earlier this year, the previous commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. John Aquilino, told Congress the new Compass Call provides great capability and he needed more for that region than what the Air Force was funded for. He noted the only caveat to that would be if there was another mechanism to deliver the capability Compass Call provides, in which case Indo-Pacom could do with less EA-37Bs. But “we do need the capabilities that currently reside in that aircraft,” he said.

“The EA-37B represents one of the major Air Force EMSO modernization efforts, and it’s a great move, along with electronic warfare capabilities integrated with our 5th-gen-and-beyond aircraft systems. The real issue is that we need more EA-37Bs than the current budget allows,” retired Lt. Gen. David Deptula, dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, said in a September podcast. “If the nation is really serious about being able to execute the current national defense strategy, we’re going to need more.”

In that limited budget environment, the Air Force will have to figure out how to make other platforms capable in the spectrum, either with their internal self-protection capabilities that have electronic attack — albeit less powerful than dedicated jamming platforms — or possibly unmanned systems such as collaborative combat aircraft.

“The Air Force is still buying Compass Calls trying to figure out what that number is. Then what do you do otherwise? What do you do about putting that capability on something else that will reach out, reduce the threat range of an adversary, so that you can drive in closer to drop your ordnance, so you can support your weapons all the way to the target?” Chuck Angus, director of business development in naval power at Raytheon, said in an interview at the AFA conference.

He noted that if the Air Force has platforms with a lot of persistence such as a drone or even a bomber, they can be useful for enabling kinetic operations.

“If you had a platform that had a lot of persistence — think about a UAS, think about a bomber that can fly for hours and hours and hours — then you probably have a platform that is very useful in this space … You can not only fly it in the area, but when they drop their weapons, you support those weapons all the way to target,” Angus said. “Magazine depth is really important. This non-kinetic electronic attack will increase that magazine depth because you have to shoot less. Those weapons will get to the target better, be more successful and then you can move to another target.”

The Air Force is looking at how to marry these capabilities with overall cost in mind, in a constrained fiscal environment.

“We’re trying to collectively look at the system with the force design that the A5/7 team has been working on to figure out how we do this the most affordable, but then also achieving the objectives that we need, but not buying the exquisite platform necessarily that’s going to — as we’ve heard the secretary and others say and the chief — that’s going to last forever,” Hauck said.

Dedicated electronic attack platforms such as the Compass Call are very good at what they do, he added, but the Air Force has to have the collective enterprise doing electronic warfare and some level of electronic attack. They must understand what the right number of platforms to purchase are and where to invest for the best bang for the buck.

“If you’re talking about a platform that’s putting a pod on, it could be important, depending on what that platform does and depending on the cost,” Hauck said. “We couldn’t just isolate ourselves and figure out a single electronic warfare solution that connected against one part of the adversary’s kill web. It has to be something that knows what the B-21 might be able to bring, that knows whatever other platform, [Next-Generation Air Dominance], CCA, you name it, might be able to bring to the fight and where they’re going to be in the flight.”

Similarly, Gaedecke explained that reading the tea leaves from what senior leaders have said, the approach is integrating different capabilities across the breadth of platforms and systems.

“How do you take these existing capabilities and integrate them across portfolio? How do you have the requirements that are integrated to solve multiple problems, versus one-off solutions for all of these different things?” he said. “When I was in uniform and I did the ECCT, I think a lot of people thought that I was going to help them solve the EF-111 replacement … [but] that’s tougher in the budget environment for the department to be able to do that. If you can’t do that with a solution, how do you do it? Even when you listen to the secretary talk about NGAD and the family of systems, again, I think through the family of systems and the capabilities you integrate versus the dedicated platform.”

All that tied to a robust battle management of the electromagnetic spectrum will be paramount to ensure forces aren’t jamming themselves, and the right platforms in the right areas are being utilized.  

“You need electromagnetic battle management capability to orchestrate which platforms are going to provide which electronic fires, similar to an air battle manager,” Niedzwiecki said. “Every platform fights the threat environment as a one-versus-many fight. Every platform has to be able to close the kill chain itself and it has to be able to address all possible threats that it will face to deny red [forces]. As we look forward with things like counter-C5ISRT, it really drives the need to build collaborative, coordinated effects across the battle space.”

DefenseScoop reporter Mikayla Easley contributed to this story.

Part two of this series will focus on how the Air Force is maturing and exercising its reprogramming enterprise.

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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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