New US Navy sixth generation fighter may face delays
May 19, 2025
When President Donald J Trump announced the selection of Boeing to build the USAF’s Next Generation Air Dominance fighter as the F-47 on 21 March 2025 , it was widely assumed that an F/A-XX selection would be announced soon afterwards. The F/A-XX is a similar next generation air dominance strike fighter being developed for the US Navy, for carrier use.
Mike Stone, the Reuters journalist who correctly predicted Trump’s US Air Force NGAD announcement, reported on 25 March that Boeing and Northrop Grumman were awaiting the announcement of a US Navy next-generation fighter engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) phase contract “that week.” No announcement was forthcoming. Nor was there an announcement at the Sea-Air-Space 2025 conference in early April.
Just as the USAF’s NGAD competition had narrowed to a two-horse race (between Boeing and Lockheed Martin) with the withdrawal of Northrop Grumman in July 2023, so the F/A-XX contest became a battle between Boeing and Northrop Grumman in early March, when Reuters, ‘Breaking Defense’, and other outlets started to report that Lockheed Martin (viewed by many as the USA’s premier fighter company) had been eliminated from the competition. Reuters reported that Lockheed Martin’s proposal “did not satisfy the service’s criteria,” and had struggled to meet the Navy’s specific requirements, including the need for a more advanced radar system and improved carrier landing capabilities. No formal announcement has been made by the US Navy about Lockheed Martin’s withdrawal.
The F/A-XX is of pivotal importance in the US Navy’s future force structure. During a recent House Appropriations Committee oversight hearing, Jacob Ellzey (the Republican representative for Texas’s 6th congressional district and a former US Navy fighter pilot, flying the F-14 and F/A-18 and amassing 830 carrier landings) observed that: “Our Navy, our joint force, and our future combatant commanders need the Navy sixth generation fighter, or the FA-XX, as it’s now called. Relying only on the Air Force’s sixth gen fighter (called the NGAD, or now the F-47) doesn’t solve our air superiority challenge, and neither does just using CCAs with the F/A-18E/F or the F-35 off aircraft carriers… It’s basic math. We need more airframes, land-based and carrier-based, and we need to complicate our adversaries targeting. And we do that having aircraft that have longer range, with weapons that have longer range, so the carrier can stand off and hit the enemy before they can hit us. We do that with AIM-174Bs and CCAs on the Gen six Navy fighter.”
Admiral James W. Kilby, the acting Chief of Naval Operations told the same House Appropriations Committee Oversight Hearing that: “The sixth-gen fighter has some capabilities that we need to counter the Peoples Republic of China. Those are signatures, those are range, those are different engines. Those are all the things that will make it survivable. The Air Force and Navy have different missions, but we’re going against the same threat. So if that threat dictates a pivot to that sixth-gen fighter, then the Navy and the Air Force and the Marine Corps and the Army and the Space Force need to bring all that to bear as a joint force, to be capable.”
The first F/A-XX aircraft is planned to enter service in the 2030s and is intended to replace F/A-18E/F Super Hornet fighters and EA-18G Growler electronic attack aircraft in US Navy carrier air wings. Kilby said that the F/A-XX would be “kind of the lead ‘Sled Dog’, with the MQ-25” and that by replacing the Growler. It would have an electronic attack capability. Thereafter a combination of F/A-XX and F-35C Lighting II will provide the CVW with its tactical fighter combat air capacity and capability.
The F/A-XX “is expected to feature superior range, speed, and sensor capabilities, with an emphasis on integrating manned and unmanned systems.” This includes autonomous drones serving as force multipliers and electronic warfare assets. Some believe that the stated aim of providing only a 25% increase in range compared to the Navy’s existing tactical combat aircraft will not extend the reach of its carrier strike groups by a sufficient amount as the range of expected threat systems is also increasing.
The Naval Aviation Playbook 2025 said that: “Efforts are underway to balance near-term investments with the development of this next-generation platform.” Incoming Navy Secretary John Phelan has said that the US Navy is “still trying to sort through the appropriate force posture and get the appropriate balance between manned and unmanned” platforms.
It is understood that the Navy wants to move forward with awarding an F/A-XX contract, but opponents are threatening to derail the planned timeline and perhaps cancel the programme altogether. It has been reported that the F/A-XX decision is “being worked” at the “secretary-level and above.”
Reuters has reported that “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s cost assessment office plans to slash funding for the next-generation jet’s development by shifting the $454 million that Congress provided for the F/A-XX in the fiscal year 2025 budget to other programs,” and “is separately preparing to ask Congress not to provide $500 million for the program which it had included in a pending reconciliation bill to help to accelerate the new jet’s development.”
Sources told Reuters that there were also “concerns about engineering and production capacity.”
Jacob Ellzey noted that a three-year delay to the F/A-XX contract would effectively be “a de facto cancellation,” implying that delaying the contract award would nullify the current bids “because contracts and pricing would expire during that time making a new competition almost inevitable.”
Republican Congressman Ken Calvert, representative for California’s 41st congressional district and the head of the House Appropriations sub-committee on defense said that: “We need sixth-generation fighters. The US Navy needs sixth-generation fighters. 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. Further, we cannot expect to grow the defense industrial base by undermining it. Aviation programs that rely on highly specialized supply chains and skilled labour cannot be turned on and off like a switch.”
