Yes, we do need the Next Generation Air Dominance fighter to ensure future air superiority, USAF study concludes.
March 7, 2025
The panel discussion at the Warfare Symposium and the Hudson Institute presentation revealed that the NGAD review had concluded that the USAF needs an aircraft that will be able to persist in contested areas. It also determined that without the new NGAD manned fighter, the USAF would be less able to achieve its assigned objectives and would face more operational risk.
For much of his tenure, the Biden administration’s Defence Secretary, Frank Kendall, sought to find a cheaper solution to the USAF’s NGAD requirement than the aircraft that were under development. He paused the source selection planned for the Summer of 2024 and instigated a deep review, reconsidering the design based on changing threats and affordability. In particular, there was a growing realisation that the USAF could not afford all of its plans, and would prioritise the B-21A Raider bomber and the LGM-35A Sentinel (also known as the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent or GBSD) over a new fighter.
Kendall pushed for a much cheaper core manned platform, which he wanted to be “less than [the price of] an F-35, or at least in the ballpark of an F-35.” He stressed that: “The F-35 kind of represents, to me, the upper bounds of what we’d like to pay for an individual [NGAD] aircraft for that mission.” Kendall proposed a lower-cost design focused primarily on acting as a ‘quarterback’ for Collaborative Combat Aircraft, which could be a derivative of today’s F-35A. “We looked at something that’s more tailored to work with [Collaborative Combat Aircraft], although, of course, NGAD could do that.”
But when the review reported, it concluded that establishing air superiority will remain central to winning future high-end fights, and that the USAF would need the ‘full fat’ NGAD if it was going to achieve air superiority.
Despite this ‘green light’ to launch NGAD’s EMD phase, then-Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall decided that the Air Force would punt the decision into the future, delaying a decision on NGAD for the incoming Trump administration, which he said: “may want some additional analysis when they show up.”
“Anything I did with a couple of months left in office was like to be reconsidered anyway, but it would be much harder to change direction if contracts were awarded and the program was moved forward. Keeping that trade space open … was a much more efficient thing to do. It was just the right thing to do,” Kendall concluded.
It is now clear that the Air Force examined a number of potential alternatives to NGAD, including a lower cost platform designed to quarterback for unmanned adjuncts. This was not felt to offer the capability needed. The air force also considered a shift away from air superiority to longer-range, standoff strike capabilities, but while such long range fires are extremely important they are unlikely to be delivered at the tempo required to apply constant pressure and keep an adversary on its knees.
Major General Joseph Kunkel, the USAF’s director of Force Design, Integration, and Wargaming within the office of the deputy chief of staff for Air Force Futures said that: “We tried a whole bunch of different options, and there was no more viable option than NGAD to achieve air superiority in this highly contested environment.”
He said of the NGAD review that: “With that study, we asked ourselves some hard questions. Is air superiority dead? What does air superiority look like in the future? Does the joint force need air superiority? And what we found is, not only in the past, not only the present, but in the future, air superiority matters.”
Another panellist, General Kenneth Wilsbach, the head of Air Combat Command (ACC) noted that: “There’s been some talk in the public about [how] the age of air superiority is over. I categorically reject that and maintain that it’s the first building block of any other military operation. The entire joint force counts on air superiority. So, anything else you want to do in the battle space, if you don’t have air superiority, it becomes much more difficult, if not impossible.” And Wilsbach believes that manned aircraft remain critically important.
“We’ve been doing quite a bit of simulator work with incorporating manned and unmanned teaming, and we believe that there’s some value to that as we go into the future. In 2025 we don’t have the artificial intelligence [AI] that we can pluck pilots out of aircraft and plunk AI in them to the degree that the AI can replace a human brain. Someday we will have that, I trust, but right now we don’t.”
Kunkel was even more vehement, saying that: “I don’t see us fully stepping away from manned aircraft ever.”
“The fight looks fundamentally different with NGAD and without NGAD. I won’t go into the details on how the fight looks different, but the fight looks much better when NGAD’s in it… If the Joint Force wants to fight with an NGAD, and [gain] air superiority in these really, really tough places to achieve it, then we’ll pursue NGAD and it’ll be less operational risk. The NGAD provides dominant capabilities. If we choose not to pursue NGAD, then that fight’s just going to look a little bit different, and we may not be able to pursue or achieve all of our policy objectives.”
But while the military and operational case for NGAD is clear, it could yet be delayed. Former Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said in January that it would cost at least approximately $20 billion to complete the development phase of the programme, and that serial production would add upwards of $300 million per aircraft, adding $60 Billion for a 200 aircraft production run. And this while Sentinel costs are ‘through the roof’, and competing priorities include the B-21, CCAs and the Next Generation tanker. Incoming Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has already ordered a complete review of spending plans for Fiscal Year 2026, hoping to reduce spending by 8% in order to fund President Donald Trump’s priorities including the Golden Dome missile defence initiative and increased spending on the southern border.
Moreover there are powerful voices within the new administration who are hostile to manned combat air. “Manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones anyway. [They] Will just get pilots killed,” Elon Musk opined on his social media platform, X. But while experts have dismissed Musk’s views, the new President may not, so NGAD may face a bumpy ride.
