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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“And so, we want to see this region, this area, remain open to freedom of navigation and the ability to fly the skies and international airways whenever we want to. We want to see that remain, and so we’re going to continue to work with our allies and partners to ensure that we can do that — and yes, you play a critical role in that, and in sending that message,” he said.

Yokosuka is the first of several military bases Austin and his team are set to tour in Japan this week, on what will ultimately be his 13th and final trip to the Indo-Pacific during his leadership tenure as America’s defense chief. After motorcading to Hardy Barracks, he and his team arrived on the Naval base in Black Hawk helicopters.

During closed-press meetings inside the aircraft carrier, he engaged with senior U.S. Naval Forces Japan leaders — as well as some of the top-performing sailors on the vessel.

Then, he took the stage on the flight deck and addressed what defense officials said were up to approximately 1,800 service members.

“I know this is a very complex endeavor, but I want you to know that I appreciate the sacrifices that you and your families make, and we’re going to continue to do everything we can to help you make moves easier and enable you to focus on what you do each and every day better,” Austin told the crowd.

Since it was docked at the Naval base last month, USS George Washington is currently the only forward-deployed U.S. aircraft carrier anywhere in the world. In this context, it’s also considered the first time that the Navy’s forward-deployed carrier air wing is equipped with fifth-generation aircraft — the stealthy F-35C.

“That is a very, very capable platform. And so, again, I think any U.S. Naval ship deployed anywhere is a statement of the U.S.’ commitment. And certainly, when you send a carrier battle group, it is a strong statement of the U.S.’ commitment,” Austin told DefenseScoop in a short press gaggle after finishing his address to the sailors.

“USS Washington is extremely important,” he added.

When asked about his team’s latest assessment of whether China’s military is presently on track to be prepared to invade Taiwan by 2027 — a stated goal of Beijing’s leadership — Austin noted that there’s been a lot of speculation lately about whether Chinese President Xi Jinping “will decide to do one thing or another.”

“I would just say from my vantage point — at this point in time — I don’t think an attack [on Taiwan] is either imminent or unavoidable. So, again, our goal is to make sure that we continue to work with likeminded partners and allies to ensure that we maintain a free and open Indo-Pacific. And we’ve been pretty successful at that,” the secretary told DefenseScoop.

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Kelly serves as the commander of the Air Force’s Air Combat Command (ACC), which is the primary force provider of combat airpower, and he oversees the operation of more than 1,000 aircraft. Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) refers to the Air Force’s complex, envisioned sixth-gen fighter initiative. It essentially encompasses what Pentagon officials refer to as a “family of systems,” including a human-operated aircraft with drones and unmanned platforms supporting it.

“I cannot tell you today what’s going on in China except that they’re planning for their 20th National Party Congress. But I can tell you what’s not happening: They’re not having a debate over the relevance of sixth-gen air dominance,” Kelly told reporters during a media roundtable at the Air and Space Forces Association’s annual Air, Space and Cyber conference. 

“And I can also tell you they’re on plan,” the four-star general added.

From his purview as a commander and command pilot, Kelly compared the U.S. and China’s approaches to this aim. 

While America’s military tends to “let go with a trapeze and kind of make a leap for the next run” when deploying new technology-driven aircraft and weapons, “the Chinese frenemies” typically opt to iterate — “5.1, 5.2, 5.3 — they tend to iterate what they have, and morph and evolve,” he noted.  

For its fourth-generation aircraft fleet, China started with the Su-27 air fighter early on and “morphed” it into the Su-30 and so on, according to Kelly. The way the nation is building the technology and the industrial base “makes it a little bit easier for them to grab the wrung when they go up to fifth-gen” compared to how the U.S. has, he said. After that, he expects the Chinese will continue to iteratively innovate their avionics up to the sixth-gen threshold. 

“We need to get there before they do, [or] it won’t end well,” Kelly said. 

The Air Force intends to provide operational capability of its NGAD program with systems online by 2030, but there is still a lot to be decided and produced for that to actually happen.

In Kelly’s view, the most pressing technological hurdles to reaching that next level of air dominance involve software and integration. While the Lockheed Martin-made F-35 combat aircraft, equipped with an advanced sensor suite, has hardware “that works phenomenally well,” the general noted, the software has been an impediment.

“We have been challenged through the growth of the airplane mostly in the software realm,” with issues around data mission files, simulation and more, Kelly added. 

“There’s more countries on the globe that can build a nuclear weapon than can build a fifth-generation aircraft. It’s just hard stuff — and the hardest of the hard stuff is coding a core processor to an integrated core process,” he told DefenseScoop during the roundtable.

Gen. Kelly is pushing for the U.S. to take a more iterative approach going forward to ensure the most sophisticated capabilities in the pipeline are operational in quicker periods of time, particularly as this high-stakes pursuit unfolds.

Although there are nuances, Kelly believes that China and the U.S. by-and-large view sixth-gen air dominance “in terms of an exponential reduction in signature,” and an “exponential acceleration” in processing power and sensing. They also both see its potential to enable military officials to program at the speed of relevance.

“I think [the Chinese] see it pretty much the same way. I essentially cyber-stalk the folks that do the design over there in the different bureaus, because I have no life. And they’re not dummies — not at all,” the commander said. “They know what they’re doing.”

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Software and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms may not have been designed for network news, but software is an indispensable capability for our military. Our service members require cutting-edge software to enable all the hardware platforms — ships, tanks, and planes — they use to carry out missions to defend our freedoms around the world.

And while all would agree that a well-maintained physical infrastructure is essential in the civilian world to establish new communities, grow our economy and build better lives, we also need infrastructure for the advanced software our military requires. We are facing adversaries who are actually quite good at software and technology, and we must be better and faster than them, or we will cede our strategic advantage.

Infrastructure for software embraces four important elements:

• Unlimited computing power and unlimited data storage;
• Open APIs (application programming interfaces) that allow different software applications to talk to one another;
• Continuous deployment and delivery of software; and
• Ability to operate at the edge of communications networks.

Unlimited computing power and unlimited data storage

This is the prerequisite for everything — the equivalent of securing reliable energy supplies in the world economy. AI and machine learning will allow us to do things on a scale and at a speed that humans cannot do, but they require access to enormous data sets, and a vast amount of computing power to rapidly run tests on that data. Ensuring that unlimited storage and computing power are available will allow our smartest engineers, working for new companies in the cloud, to find new ways of using software to keep our systems ahead of our adversaries.

Open APIs

We should require any company that is providing any capability to the Department of Defense to have open APIs so that anyone can connect, anyone can write to the system, and anyone can receive data from the system and authenticate to the system — not just the original contractor on the program of record. This allows new companies, new disrupters, new unforeseen technologies, and new capabilities to be added to already existing systems at any moment.

That is essentially how the internet works today in the civilian world, allowing new capabilities to be plugged in, or new apps to be developed and added to smartphones. Contrast that model with the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, where plugging in new capabilities is really hard for any outside contractor. Open APIs will allow us to guard against vendor-lock in the long term.

Continuous deployment and updating of software

Things change quickly in the software world. We must have infrastructure that allows us to update it every day — or every hour — if necessary, and release new capabilities that maybe didn’t exist a week prior, just like smartphones automatically update overnight. In the military of today, it simply isn’t good enough to wait for periodic servicing: If it is going to take 12 to 18 months to update software on a fighter jet, that’s not going to be effective on the battlefield.

Operating at the edge

We will need to have systems that can operate at the very edge, far from home in denied environments that don’t have access to continual communications — high in the mountains of central Asia, in the middle of the Pacific, or in a zone where our adversaries are blocking all signals. That means building resilient systems that can disconnect and reconnect, synchronize and go back in as and when possible.

Prioritize outcomes, not architectures

Finally, it is important to remember that we will never be able to fully guess the requirements of the future. In the civilian world, when we zone areas for development and build new access roads, we don’t know what buildings are going to be constructed, what new businesses are going to be established there, or who is going to choose to relocate there.

Similarly in the military when we start applying AI algorithms to massive data sets, we won’t know exactly how those results will go together with missions and objectives that evolve over time. So our requirements must be more flexible. It is going to take a little courage because we are going to have to break down barriers between combatant commands and the services so they all can share data. It is going to be disruptive, not the norm. But we have to do it. And we need to know we have the software infrastructure to make it all possible.

Chris Lynch is the chief executive officer at Rebellion Defense. Previously, he was founding director at Defense Digital Service. His team launched high-impact programs, including JEDI Cloud and Hack the Pentagon, and provided technical expertise on the Department of Defense’s most critical technology challenges, including the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and Next Generation GPS OCX. Chris is a serial entrepreneur from Seattle, where he founded venture-backed startups and led engineering teams at enterprise companies. He is a fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center and lecturer at Stanford’s computer science department, where he encourages nerds to serve in government.

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