Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.), the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee’s (HASC) tactical air and land forces panel, said on Tuesday that he recently received a briefing from the U.S. Navy and Air Force on their Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) fighter programs.
“We had a great briefing the other morning,” Wittman told reporters after his address to the McAleese & Associates‘ Defense Programs Conference in Arlington, Va. “I asked the Air Force and Navy to come in. They briefed the president last week too so I think that that capability is necessary, especially because it involves a family of systems concept, and we’re gonna have to be able to operate in some way in that highly contested environment.”
A Trump administration decision is nigh on the military services’ NGAD programs, as DoD finalizes its fiscal 2026 budget request (Defense Daily, Feb. 25). The Navy has called its NGAD effort to replace the service’s Boeing [BA] F/A-18 Super Hornets and Growlers F/A-XX, while the Air Force is looking to replace its Lockheed Martin [LMT] F-22s.
Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman [NOC] have been competing for F/A-XX, and the Air Force’s field includes the first two companies after Northrop Grumman’s exit in 2023.
The Air Force has wanted to field a mix of manned NGAD sixth generation fighters and unmanned, autonomous Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCAs), as part of the NGAD program, but an all autonomous fighter fleet looks to be a technological bridge too far, at least in the near term, and a bridge that the service may not want to cross due to tradition and to the argued benefits of manned platforms when “analog” knife fights become necessary.
The Air Force paused a decision on manned NGAD last year to leave to the incoming Trump team, and former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said a week before the Biden administration left office that manned NGAD would require more than $20 billion extra in research and development funding (Defense Daily, Jan. 13). Kendall also had said his goal was to reduce the estimated unit cost of manned NGAD to that of a Lockheed Martin F-35–a more than $150 million unit cost reduction that the Air Force viewed as a budget exercise and one that is not feasible, though the service continues to examine how to reduce manned NGAD life cycle costs, including for low-observable maintenance.
“My concern has always been this [NGAD] capability is going to occur years and years out in the future,” Wittman said on Tuesday. “I would argue we don’t have the luxury of time. How do we field that capability quickly? These are pretty exquisite systems, but there are also parts of that family of systems, like CCAs, that we can move to the left, and that does even more to enable F-35. F-35 [is] getting up to speed, not as fast as we would like, but it’s gonna get there. We see with a lot of the studies that if you combine an F-35 with modernized capabilities–with a Distributed Aperture System [DAS], with an APG-85 radar–if you combine that with a CCA, all of a sudden that’s a pretty formidable platform in the Indo-Pacific.”
Wittman said last September that it has taken an average of 78 days to test the Northrop Grumman APG-85 Active Electronically Scanned Array radar, which is to replace the F-35’s APG-81, also by Northrop Grumman, and that he has met monthly with Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Schmidt, the director of the F-35 Joint Program Office, to discuss the fighter, including reducing the radar testing time (Defense Daily, Sept. 4, 2024).
Northrop Grumman also has built the AAQ-37 DAS to provide missile warning and situational awareness to F-35 pilots.
In June, 2018, Lockheed Martin chose Raytheon, now part of RTX [RTX], to build the Electro-Optical DAS, the follow-on to the AAQ-37. Lockheed Martin builds the F-35’s AN/AAQ-40 Electro-Optical Targeting System (EOTS).