Still no announcement of US Navy F/A-XX decision, but some details revealed
April 10, 2025
The new Secretary of the Navy, John Phelan, was confirmed on Monday 24 March 2025. A new acting Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), Admiral James W. Kilby took up his post on 21 February 2025.
The first predicted window for an F/A-XX announcement was the week of 24-30 March. Reuters’ Mike Stone reported on 25 March that Boeing and Northrop Grumman were awaiting the announcement of a US Navy next-generation fighter contract that week. Reuters reported that the two companies had submitted detailed proposals and prototypes for evaluation.
Lockheed Martin had initially been seen as a strong contender for F/A-XX, but Reuters reported on 4 March that what many view as the USA’s premier fighter company had been eliminated from the competition. It was said that Lockheed Martin’s proposal “did not satisfy the service’s criteria,” according to ‘Breaking Defense’. Reuters reported that the Lockheed Martin proposal 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.
Interestingly, Northrop Grumman dropped out of the US Air Force NGAD fighter competition, in part to focus on the F/A-XX, leaving two bidders in each of the US air dominance competitions – Boeing and Lockheed in the USAF NGAD contest, and Boeing and Northrop Grumman for F/A-XX.
There are significant spending plans for the programme between Fiscal Years 2024 and 2028, totalling more than US $9 billion.
The Navy is due to choose one company’s proposal for the engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) phase, which is estimated as being worth “single-digit billions of dollars in the short term,” of an F/A-XX programme total amounting to “potentially hundreds of billions over the decades it is expected to run.”
The F/A-XX is intended to replace the Navy’s F/A-18E/F Super Hornet fleet, and to provide greater range and endurance for the carrier air wing, with a significant increase the unrefuelled combat radius in order to reach relevant target sets while keeping the carrier itself at a safe distance from anti-ship and other anti-access systems. It will eventually be paired with CCAs which enjoy similar range/endurance capabilities, with unmanned adjuncts forming a higher percentage of the Wing than manned aircraft by the latter part of the 2030s.
The Next Generation Air Dominance programme was briefly conceived as a joint Air Force-Navy programme, but as requirements diverged, the two services soon established separate offices and the two programmes separated.
Dimensional and weight limits imposed by carrier operation limit maximum aircraft sizes and weights, meaning that the US Navy cannot simply adopt a navalised version of the USAF aircraft.
USN deck elevators are about 85ft long by 50ft wide on the Ford-class, and a little smaller on the Nimitz-class ships. The steam catapults of the Nimitz-class carriers cannot cope with take off weights of more than 90,000-lbs, while the arresting gear cannot stop an aircraft with a landing weight of more than about 55,000lbs.
There is still some direct co-operation between the separate projects, and there is expected to be some use of common sensors and systems. Both NGAD and F/A-XX will feature long range manned fighters at the heart of a broader ‘system of systems’ that will also include advanced Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) drones.
When no announcement was made then, attention turned to the Sea-Air-Space 2025 event between 7-10 April. Again, no announcement was made. On 8 April, the first day of the exhibition, Admiral James Kilby, the new Acting Chief of Naval Operations, said that the final decision as to who would build the next-generation F/A-XX was under discussion by senior officials. Kilby said that: “It’s a decision at the secretary-level and above, and they’re working that now. I don’t want to get ahead of the contract decision, but I will tell you we need F/A-XX in the United States Navy just like the Air Force says [about NGAD]. I mean we’re talking about a fight in the Pacific. We fight together as a joint force, so having that capability is very important for us.”
Though there was no announcement, further details of the F/A-XX programme and requirement were revealed at the event, where a number of senior Navy officers spoke about F/A-XX in very general terms at Sea-Air-Space 2025.
Rear Admiral Michael ‘Buzz’ Donnelly, the director of the Air Warfare Division within the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, spoke at the Navy League’s Sea Air Space conference. He said that the new aircraft would allow the Navy to operate in contested environments outmatching adversaries in ways that the Navy’s current fighters cannot. F/A-XX will be able to “penetrate threat airspace. That will pace the threat that we see into the future beyond 2040. So that’s what we see as essential as the threat builds out its ISR capabilities and increases kinetic capabilities. We do that today, but we do it at parity because of the capabilities we have fielded today. So F/A-XX is going to be that next improvement.”
Donnelly said that: “It could be our last tactical manned fighter that we operate out of the Navy. It will actually be at a point where we are more man-on-the-loop than man-in-the-loop, and be the bridge to fully integrating towards the hybrid [crewed/uncrewed] air wing in the future, in the 2040s.”
F/A-XX will include a number of new capabilities and technologies, including artificial intelligence and machine learning. “With the integration of AI and other technical advantages, [F/A-XX will] allow us to have increased battle space management.” Donnelly said.
The aircraft will also feature a fully integrated architecture with new unmanned systems, helping to bring the Navy into a new era in which piloted and unmanned aircraft operate more closely together. Donnelly said that the F/A-XX would be “our next platform that, instead of being man-in-the-loop, will truly be man-on-the-loop, and allow us to have fully integrated architecture with our unmanned systems that we’re going to be fielding.”
Donnelly told reporters that F/A-XX is expected to have an unrefuelled combat radius more than 25% greater than “we’re currently seeing today to give us better flexibility [and] operational reach. That’s a core attribute of the F/A-XX. It will definitely have longer inherent range, and then with refuelling, you could say that’s indefinite, as long as refuelling is available.” The F-35C Joint Strike Fighter (the longest ranged fighter on US Navy carriers today) has a range of more than 1,200 nautical miles, and a combat radius of 670 nautical miles (about 1,241 kilometres). This would imply a maximum combat radius of roughly 837 nautical miles (just over 1,550 kilometres) for F/A-XX. This is impressive, but many suspect that it may not be enough, given the expanding size of China’s A2/AD envelope.
Air Vice Marshal Jim Beck, the RAF’s Director Capability and Programmes stressed the importance of China and Russia’s so-called A2AD (Anti-Access Area Denial) capabilities. These, he said, “push you away, to keep you out of the fight”, and are “very, very difficult to overcome.” He said that the “ranges we’re dealing with are 500 nautical miles today,” and would “reach 1,000 nautical miles by 2030.”
This is why the Anglo-Italian-Japanese GCAP specification is understood to call for a range of more than double that of the F-35, and not just 25% more!
