The Navy’s future fighter jet, known as the F/A-XX, must look beyond technologies of today such as stealth, have a flexible design so it can be manned or pilotless and won’t have to be “super-duper fast,” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert said Wednesday.
Even as the Navy, along with the Air Force and Marine Corps, is in the early stages of buying Lockheed Martin’s [LMT] F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a stealth fifth-generation aircraft expected to be operational for five decades, the Navy is already looking to the future fighter that will eventually replace the fleet of Boeing [BA]-built F/A-18 Super Hornets and EA-18 Growlers. The Super Hornets will likely start retiring in the mid-2030s.
“Technological lead is perishable,” Greenert said at the Naval Future Force Science and Technology Expo hosted by the Office of Naval Research and American Society of Naval Engineers in Washington.
Greenert said that in the future, fifth-generation stealth fighters may not be as effective at avoiding detection and it might be necessary for sixth-generation fighters to look elsewhere to defeat enemy air defenses.
“Stealth may be overrated,” he said, later adding: “You can’t be so stealthy that you become invisible. You are going to generate a signature of some sort in the science that we have today.”
In the future, any aircraft that disrupts air and generates even low levels of engine heat could be spotted given the proliferation of technology.
“It’s going to be detectable,” he said.
The F/A-XX won’t necessarily have to be “super-duper fast,” and instead should rely on deploying with equipment to counter increasingly capable hostile sensors and air defenses, Greenert said.
“You can’t outrun a missile,” he said.
As a key priority, Greenert cited the importance of the F/A-XX being optionally manned or unmanned, giving the aircraft the flexibility to tradeoff pilots in favor of a bigger payload to add more weapons and other capabilities to address new and emerging threats.
He said the payload needed to employ a “multiple spectrum of weapons” for suppressing enemy air defenses.
“Today it’s radar, but it might be something else in the future,” he said.
The Navy in 2012 issued a request for information to the aerospace industry seeking ideas to help development the concept for the F/A-XX. Key companies that would be interested in the program are Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman [NOC].