Although the Air Force’s work on hypersonic weapons is progressing, it’s not moving fast enough, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told reporters at the Air Force Association’s Air, Space and Cyber conference.

On top of that, the service has not laid out in enough detail which missions will call for the use of hypersonic weapons, how to fit them into operations and whether the technologies in development will allow the service to accomplish its goals, he said.

“It’s pretty clear to me what the Chinese want to do with the hypersonics they’re developing. It’s even pretty clear to me what the Russians might want to do with hypersonics,” Kendall said.

“The target set that we would want to address, and why hypersonics are the most cost effective weapons for the U.S., I think it’s still to me somewhat of a question mark,” he added. “I haven’t seen all the analysis that’s been done to justify the current program.”

Air Combat Command head Gen. Mark Kelly agreed more work needs to be done to ensure the hypersonic weapons being developed can be incorporated into normal operations.

“I think he’s right. We do need to make sure we have an unambiguous, well-understood [concept of operations] we go forward to,” he said Wednesday. “We need to make sure that, before we pull the trigger and commit a ton of resources to it, everyone’s on the same piece of music.”

While Kendall did not criticize a specific program, the service’s AGM-183 Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon has encountered several flight test failures over the past year and — as the first hypersonic missile set to become operational — is the Air Force’s most visible hypersonic weapons program.

Most recently, during a July 28 test over Point Mugu Sea Range near southern California, the missile’s engine failed to ignite after the weapon was launched from a B-52 bomber.

The Air Force hasn’t yet isolated the root cause of that failed test, said Brig. Gen. Health Collins, the Air Force’s program executive for weapons, during a webinar hosted by Defense News on Monday.

However, as long as the program is able to fix the issue and resume flight testing by the end of 2021, the program will stay on track to put ARRW into production in fiscal 2022, he said.

“I will caveat, though, that depends on the root cause being found and in us getting back into flight this year,” Collins said, adding that other failures could further impact the schedule.

Although Kendall is scrutinizing the Air Force’s hypersonic programs, he has not slowed down either ARRW or the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile, said Lt. Gen. Duke Richardson, the service’s top uniformed acquisition official.

“Secretary Kendall has not spared any program,” he said Tuesday. “He’s doing exactly what you would expect the secretary of the Air Force to do — he’s coming in with some questions. I think he’s seeing the fiscal environment and he wants to make sure that we’re focused on the war fighter.”

The service is set to decide whether General Electric, Rolls-Royce or Pratt & Whitney will produce modified commercial engines to outfit the B-52, which is set to fly through at least 2050.

“We’re starting to wrap that work up. It shouldn’t be much longer,” said Lt. Gen. Duke Richardson, the Air Force’s top uniformed officer for acquisition.

Darlene Costello, the service’s acting acquisition executive, said the source selection team is completing its work and the service could be ready to announce a winner “probably within the month.”

“It could be faster, but they have to do their due diligence, and I’m not going to get in their way,” she said. “I will not step in until they’ve completed their work.”

The Air Force operates 74 B-52s, each outfitted with eight TF33 engines. The service plans to order 592 new engines, plus spares and support, from the winner of the B-52 Commercial Engine Replacement Program.

The service released a solicitation to industry in May 2020 that initially projected a contract award in June 2021.

Pratt & Whitney, the incumbent manufacturer of the B-52′s TF33 engine, has proposed its PW800. GE Aviation offered the CF34-10 and Passport engines, and Rolls-Royce put forward its F130 engine for the competition.

In the first phase of the program, the service chose to use a contracting mechanism called mid-tier acquisition authority, which allows it to accelerate prototyping new technologies while reducing certain regulatory requirements. Richardson said it has helped to save time in the front end of the effort.

At some point, Costello said, the Air Force will determine whether to continue the effort as a traditional program of record or continue using mid-tier authorities to prototype elements of the new engines.

To expedite engine development, the companies created digital prototypes of its engines that were able to be plugged into a virtual model of the B-52. Richardson said he expects that work will “save us quite a bit of time going forward.”

“We have been living off of bomber fleet investments made many decades ago, but that is rapidly changing,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told the audience at the Air Force Association’s Air, Space and Cyber Conference here.

“As I speak there are now five test aircraft being manufactured on the B-21 production line at Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California,” he said. “You will never hear me make optimistic predictions about programs. All programs have risk and the same is true of the B-21, but at this point at least, the program is making good progress to real fielded capability.”

Previously, the Air Force had only acknowledged two B-21 test aircraft in production — a sign that the program may be accelerating as it heads toward a planned first flight in 2022.

The Air Force plans to buy at least 100 B-21s, which will begin fielding in the mid-2020s.

It’s unclear how close Northrop Grumman is to finishing construction on the first B-21.

In January, Randall Walden, who directs the Air Force’s Rapid Capability Office that manages the B-21 program, stated that the first aircraft had not yet begun final assembly but was “really starting to look like a bomber.”

Production of the second Raider — which will be used to validate the air vehicle — showed signs of becoming more efficient, Walden said at the time, and Northrop was working on creating more space at its plant to begin work on additional test aircraft.

“The second one is really more about structures, and the overall structural capability,” he said. “We’ll go in and bend it, we’ll test it to its limits, make sure that the design and the manufacturing and the production line make sense.”

“I have one request of the Congress: help us to focus on the one fight — the strategic competitive fight — we must win,” Kendall said during a speech at the Air Force Association’s Air, Space and Cyber conference.

“We will not succeed against a well-resourced and strategic competitor if we insist on keeping every legacy system we have,” he said. “Our one team cannot win its one fight to deter China or Russia without the resources we need and a willingness to balance risk today to avoid much greater risk in the future.”

“I do understand the political constraints here, and I’m happy to work with Congress to find a better mechanism to make the changes we need, but we must move forward,” Kendall added.

Immediately after taking office in late July, Kendall put the Air Force and Space Force to work on an intense exercise meant to overhaul the services’ budget ahead of its submission to the Office of the Secretary of Defense two days later.

The resulting budget submission does not comply with congressional direction to retain certain numbers of legacy aircraft, said Kendall, who did not elaborate further.

In recent years, the service has shied away from seeking to retire full fleets of aircraft, as was common practice during the Obama administration when the Air Force unsuccessfully tried to divest its U-2 spyplanes, RQ-4 Global Hawk surveillance drones and A-10 Warthog attack planes.

At the time, leaders said Budget Control Act caps made it impossible to modernize the force with next-generation aircraft while at the same time hanging on to aging planes that are expensive to maintain.

Instead, over the past two years, the Air Force put forward budget proposals that called for retiring portions of certain aircraft inventories — several squadrons of A-10s, the oldest model Global Hawks and dozens of aging KC-10 and KC-135 tankers, for example.

Kendall signaled the service could return to a more aggressive approach, where it will push lawmakers to approve the retirements of “aircraft that we no longer need and that do not intimidate China.”

In an August interview with Defense News, Kendall said the Air Force was considering bundling aircraft divestments in a single package, which would allow the service to make cuts without having to debate every proposed retirement individually.

These older fleets are “consuming precious resources we do need for modernization,” Kendall said at the conference. While it’s understandable that lawmakers try to protect their districts’ economies, local political interests are coming at the expense of national security priorities, he added.

“It was a frequent occurrence during my confirmation process to have a senator agree with me about the significance of the Chinese threat, and in the same breath to tell me that under no circumstances could the — take your pick — C-130s, A-10s, KC-10s, [or] MQ-9s in that senator’s state be retired, nor could any base in his or her state ever be closed or lose manpower that would cause impact to the local economy,” he said.

Kendall asked the audience to imagine a headline in a Chinese newspaper where the Chinese legislature’s representative in Hunan opposed the retirement of J-10 fighters until the J-20 had been fielded.

“Can any of you imagine that headline in the South China Morning Post?” he asked. “I cannot.”

The answer to the problem, according to Maj. Gen. David A. Harris, the Air Force’s director of innovation and integration, might be found in the nascent high-speed vertical takeoff and lift aircraft being developed by industry.

“If you look at the time and distance problem that [U.S. Indo-Pacific Command] presents to us, I have to be able to get to someplace fast,” he said during an Aug. 24 interview with Defense News.

“Speed is also survivability,” he added. “I want something that can land off of the runway, but yet have enough useful cargo space where I can offload a runway repair kit, fuel, more base defense munitions [or] more armament.”

The Air Force is looking for a high speed vertical takeoff and landing aircraft that can achieve similar speeds to jet aircraft, with systems such as active/passive threat detection and countermeasures that can make it more survivable in a combat environment. The aircraft should also be large enough to rapidly transport cargo and be capable of plugging into the service’s wider battle network.

Longer endurance and the ability to fly long ranges is also a plus.

“[It’s] something that could fly maybe 800 miles,” Harris said. “It’s low visibility, it’s low signature, but it can get in and it can get out.”

High-speed VTOL aircraft technology is still relatively immature, and the Air Force has no program of record to fund the development of such technology.

However, companies like Bell Flight and Lockheed Martin’s Sikorsky have presented concepts to the Air Force that have generated some interest, Harris said.

“There’s a lot of different designs out there,” he said. “We’re still trying to get through and to figure out what’s going to be the most beneficial for us when it comes to the requirements we have to operate and specifically support logistics under attack.”

In August, the service’s innovation hub AFWERX conducted a showcase of 35 high-speed VTOL concepts, with entrants from longtime defense contractors like Bell and newcomers such as Horizon Aircraft.

With that event now over, the companies are waiting to hear whether the service will award money for further development activities.

“We’re working pretty aggressively to prepare for what we believe is the true proof of concept, which is an air vehicle in flight,” said Jeff Nissen, senior manager for advanced technology at Bell Flight. “This is an aircraft that’s doing something that’s never been done before. We feel that that is the aha moment or the critical milestone event to really showcase what this technology can do.”

Longer ranges, tougher adversaries

Special operations forces were often the tip of the spear during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, flying in on AC-130 gunships or CV-22 Ospreys during the dark of night, inserting troops to conduct covert operations, providing close air support to troops on the ground, or rescuing an injured servicemember stuck in an austere location.

“Coming out of the war on terror, we had a bias toward action,” said Harris, who served as a master navigator for Air Force Special Operations Command onboard AC-130s and MC-130s. “At the end of the day, you’re still going to kill terrorists on the battlefield.”

But with a potential adversary like China, AFSOC will face an a much more advanced foe with long-range weaponry capable of disrupting operations at most of the U.S. Air Force’s major airbases in the Asia-Pacific and holding most of its current aircraft inventory at a distance.

High speed VTOL technology could enable special forces to conduct missions such as personnel recovery and aeromedical evacuation, as well as to quietly insert and retrieve special operators, he said.

The technology could also be key outside the SOF community for implementing the Air Force’s “agile combat employment” concept, which calls for small packages of aircraft to be able to distribute to austere airfields inside friendly nations, where they can refuel, reload weapons and take off again.

“At some point, you run out of fuel, and at some point, you run out of munitions, and you have to be able to go into that contested environment to resupply,” Harris said. “And if your runways are bombed, or cratered, and you can’t land things in there, how do you do it?”

In early August, Bell unveiled conceptual designs for a high-speed VTOL platform, which could come in light, medium and heavy-lift variants. The company hopes to develop a rotorcraft that can fly at more than 400 knot speeds — far beyond what tiltrotor technology can currently accomplish — and achieve a mission radius of 500 miles.

Survivability is also a key characteristic of the design concept, and it’s attained through concealing the rotor blades after the aircraft takes off, folding them inward, and relying on jet thrust when flying forward, Nissen said.

“If you look at our aircraft in its cruise mode configuration, you won’t see any spinning rotors and that’s what predominantly drives the radar cross section of a rotorcraft, is the rotor disc,” Nissen said. “Look at that aircraft concept in its jet mode configuration. It sure does look a lot like a jet. That means it will have the signature like a jet in radar.”

Bell has begun doing risk reduction on what is sees as the three main areas for technology development: the vertical lift component, flight controls and engine technology.

Propulsion is particularly challenging due to the requirements to generate shaft horsepower for the rotor system and then transition to jet thrust to enable high speeds and high cruise altitudes. An flight demonstrator for the light variant would use two different commercial engines to achieve that capability, Nissen said.

“Other variants, you might be able to combine that into a single engine,” he said. “There’s work that we’ve been doing — especially with our supplier Rolls Royce Libertyworks — on what is called a convertible engine that has both the ability to generate shaft horsepower as well as turbofan thrust.”

While Harris mentioned Sikorsky has also presented information on its future rotorcraft concepts to the Air Force, the company declined to provide further information.

“While it’s too early to comment on specific conversations and/or possible solutions, we look forward to working with the U.S. Air Force as it refines its needs,” Jay Macklin, Sikorsky’s business development director for future vertical lift, said in a statement.

Aerospace startups and other nontraditional vendors have also shown interest in working with the Air Force on high-speed VTOL.

AFWERX’s showcase event included entrants such as Horizon Aircraft’s Cavorite X5 — which the company claims will fly at speeds of 275 miles per hour over 340 mile ranges — and Jaunt Air Mobility’s hybrid-electric MAV55.

Other contenders include a Northrop Grumman-Jetoptera team, which collaborated on a concept that will use “adaptive fluidic propulsion” to create an aircraft that can fly like a jet and hover like a helicopter, all while using less fuel.

Ultimately, how fast high-speed VTOL technology can be matured will depend on whether the Air Force is ready to buy into a development program, Nissen said.

“We’ve developed plans to demonstrate this quickly and create an opportunity to field it quickly,” he said. “But it’s really going to be driven by a future, to-be-disclosed acquisition and program of record timeline.”

But it will come with strings attached — namely the handover of critical technical data that will make it easier for the department to do the maintenance itself if Lockheed fails to deliver on its promises.

“We’re using really the incentive of the PBL to help us get decent pricing on the tech data required [for the services to do more sustainment organically], so that at the end of that PBL, the services and the department have an option for moving forward,” Lt. Gen. Eric Fick, who leads the Pentagon’s F-35 joint program office, told reporters during a roundtable.

“If it comes to pass that Lockheed really kills it and we end up with great performance, then why would we not sign up for another PBL?” he said. “But if they’re not — if the services and the department and the partners are unsatisfied with the performance — now we have an option [to do sustainment work ourselves], because we have the data that allows us to do something different.”

Earlier this week, the Defense Department awarded Lockheed a contract for F-35 sustainment for FY21, with options for an additional two years that would bring the value of the deal to $6.6 billion.

That agreement will lay the groundwork for a more expansive, five-year performance-based logistics contract for “supply chain management and demand reduction,” Fick said. Put in basic terms, the agreement is meant to ensure F-35 parts can be repaired and made available to the flight line quickly.

For the aspects of sustainment not covered by the PBL, the Pentagon would continue to negotiate annual contracts with the company, he said.

Lockheed has been pursuing a performance-based logistics contract since 2019, when it proposed a fixed-price agreement that would keep the F-35 fleet at an 80 percent mission capable rate. Pentagon leaders were wary of the offer and rejected it, but undertook a study on whether a more limited PBL could provide value.

Ultimately, Fick said, the department opted to negotiate a normal annual sustainment contract for FY21 and signed a memorandum of agreement with Lockheed in spring 2020 that laid out the conditions necessary to enter a PBL.

“We knew as a department, that we did not want to be trapped into a bad deal, for the schedule to be weaponized and for us to have to sign a bad PBL,” Fick said.

Most importantly, the memorandum also included a mandate: Concurrent with the signing of a PBL, Lockheed must agree to a contract to deliver technical data that would allow the U.S. military to take on more supply chain management itself.

The department specifically wants to gain the “provisioning and cataloguing data” that would allow a manager at a depot to order the components and materiel needed for maintaining the F-35, not the design data that is more closely guarded by the company, Fick said.

Congress is wary of a PBL and has advocated for the Defense Department to introduce greater competition for F-35 sustainment, which is almost completely carried out by the prime contractors for the air vehicle and engine — Lockheed Martin and Pratt & Whitney, respectively.

The House Armed Services Committee’s proposed version of the FY22 National Defense Authorization Act directs the Defense Department to provide a briefing on how it could create a “competitive sustainment environment” for the F-35, which the committee believes could “reduce lifecycle costs, increase efficiency, and drive innovation while strengthening the overall viability of the program.”

The bill also prohibits starting a performance-based logistics contact for the F-35 unless the defense secretary certifies that the program meets affordability targets and that sustainment costs would continue to decrease.

Fick said he is generally supportive of increasing competition in the F-35 program.

“[Competition] drives affordability, it drives responsiveness, it drives a focus that the sole-source environment doesn’t,” he said.

Pressed on whether the department would consider competing F-35 sustainment if Lockheed does not perform well on a PBL, Fick said that isn’t the intent, but acknowledged other companies could probably pick up portions of the work.

“Lockheed Martin, as our prime contractor, owns a lot of the intellectual property associated with the system,” he said. “We have access to pieces of it and will continue to use it, but our ability to take and pass that to another so that they might use it is in some ways limited.”

The agreement funds the sustainment of the F-35 air system for U.S. and international customers during FY21, with options for FY22 and FY23 that would bring the contract’s total value to $6.6 billion.

During that time, the average cost per flight hour for all F-35 variants will drop from $36,100 in 2020 to $33,400 in 2023, according to a Defense Department statement. For the F-35A conventional takeoff and landing model — the most prevalent variant of the aircraft, used by the U.S. Air Force and most international customers — the cost per flight hour will go from $33,600 in 2020 to $30,000 in 2023.

Lockheed’s share of the cost per flying hour would decrease by more than 30 percent from the 2020 contract, said Bridget Lauderdale, Lockheed’s vice president for the F-35 program.

The deal will also drive improvements in full mission capable rates and supply metrics, the department stated.

“Working together with our industry partner, the F-35 joint program office team negotiated aggressive cost savings and performance targets that will benefit the global F-35 sustainment enterprise, and all F-35 customers,” said Lt. Gen. Eric Fick, who leads the F-35 joint program office on behalf of the Pentagon. “This ‘21-’23 sustainment contract agreement is a positive step in securing affordable lifecycle costs for our customers.”

The contract covers “on-site support of day-to-day operations from LM field service representatives, engineers, and Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) administrators, along with global enterprise support for sustaining engineering, supply chain, repair and replenishment material, and training,” according to the program office.

However, it does not include the cost of sustaining the jet’s F135 engine, which is negotiated in a separate contract with manufacturer Pratt & Whitney.

Importantly, both the program office and Lockheed Martin stated that the deal “lays the groundwork” for a future performance-based logistics contract, which the company has sought over the past few years.

In 2019, Lockheed proposed a performance-based logistics contract it claimed would result in $1 billion in savings for the department, but the Pentagon rejected the offer. Fick in 2020 said the department was still working to “crisply articulate [its] desired role” in sustaining the jet and didn’t want to get locked into a deal that wouldn’t meet its requirements.

Lockheed presented a scaled-down version of the proposal to the Pentagon earlier this year. That offer centered around ensuring the availability of spare parts and accelerating repair times and would have run from 2022 to 2026.

However, some lawmakers are skeptical a performance-based logistics contract will produce the intended results.

The House Armed Services Committee’s version of the FY22 defense authorization bill includes language that would prohibit the Defense Department from entering into such a deal for the F-35 program unless the defense secretary certifies that the program meets cost reduction metrics and that sustainment costs would further decrease under the terms of the agreement.

WASHINGTON—The U.S. Air Force’s top general backs proposed legislation that would cap the number of F-35s the Defense Department can buy unless it meets affordability goals for operating and sustaining the jet.

The House Armed Services Committee’s version of the fiscal 2022 defense policy bill — approved by the committee last Thursday — would require the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps to meet targets for “cost per tail per year,” which measures the average cost of flying, maintaining, and upgrading the jet.

Asked about the provision during the Defense News Conference on Wednesday, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. CQ Brown indicated he would support the proposed cost constraints.

“The language from Congress is really in line with what we’re trying to get done,” Brown said.

“One of our goals is to actually make this [program] affordable, and to make the sustainment costs affordable,” he said, calling it a “focus” for the service.

On Sept. 9, Brown clarified in a statement to Defense News that “his comments are not tied to any particular legislation and instead speak to ongoing efforts with Congress and industry partners to achieve affordability goals.”

The Air Force plans to buy 1,763 F-35A conventional takeoff and landing models throughout the program of record. However, the total lifecycle cost of supporting that number of aircraft remains more than what the service projects it can afford.

In FY20, it cost the Air Force about $8 million to operate and sustain each F-35A — about twice the target cost per tail per year of $4.1 million.

By 2036 — when F-35 operations reach their peak — the gap between that metric and the actual cost could amount to a recurring annual charge of $4.4 billion, according to a July report from the Government Accountability Office.

The proposed language is meant to induce Lockheed Martin and the Defense Department to work together on a solution that will lower sustainment costs, said HASC Chairman Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash.

“If you bring the sustainment cost down, we’ll buy more,” Smith said during a Aug. 31 event at the Brookings Institution. “If you don’t, we’re not going to, simply because of the cost that is involved in that.”

The HASC version of the National Defense Authorization Act still needs to make it over several legislative hurdles before it becomes law. The House will be able to amend the bill before it passes through the lower chamber. Then, HASC lawmakers will work with their counterparts in the Senate Armed Services Committee on a final version of the bill.

It’s unclear whether SASC will be supportive of the F-35 cost constraints; its NDAA contained no such language to limit F-35 procurement.

If the provisions do become law, the Defense Department will have its work cut out for it as it tries to meet affordability targets.

The GAO has criticized the F-35 program’s stakeholders — which include the services, the F-35 joint program office, Lockheed and engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney — for having “unique and differing perspectives on affordability” that make it difficult to come to a consensus for how to best attack the problem.

But Brown said Wednesday he believes the organizations are “all committed to the same thing. … Make the sustainment cost more reasonable.”

The service is undertaking the study as it readies its fiscal 2023 budget and grapples with reducing the types of fighters it flies from seven to four main platforms by 2030, as prescribed by the service’s chief of staff.

The four platforms could include:

• The sixth-generation Next Generation Air Dominance system, or NGAD, which will supersede the F-22.
• The F-35A Joint Strike Fighter, which will make up the preponderance of the fleet.
• The F-15EX, which will replace much of the existing F-15 inventory.
• And either the F-16 or its replacement.

That last decision is the most significant for the F-35 program. The Air Force’s original plan was to purchase enough F-35s to supersede all of its F-16s. So if the Air Force keeps the F-16 — or develops a separate low-cost replacement for part of the F-16 fleet — does it need to buy as many F-35s?

“That’s the big question,” said Todd Harrison, an aerospace and defense budget expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Quite honestly, I don’t think there is any good news that will come out for the F-35 program for this. It’s only potential downsides. That’s real risk to the program.”

The Air Force has maintained that the F-35 program of record remains unchanged, but the ongoing tactical aircraft study is set to provide alternative models of what its fighter inventory could look like, potentially including proposals with fewer F-35s.

The idea that the Air Force would buy all 1,763 F-35As “has been the greatest work of fiction in defense budgeting for about a decade now,” said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst with the Teal Group. “What we’re really talking about is the real number. It’s not 1,763 [F-35As]. Is it 1,200? Is it 1,400? Is it 1,000? We don’t know.”

Any plans to radically reshape the Air Force’s fighter inventory will come under scrutiny by new civilian leadership, which includes Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and Andrew Hunter, who was nominated to become the service’s acquisition chief.

Kendall, who served as the Pentagon’s top acquisition official during the Obama administration, has criticized the F-35 program, calling the early years of its development “acquisition malpractice.” However, he grew more supportive of the aircraft during his tenure, in May calling it “the best tactical aircraft of its type in the world.”

Asked recently whether the Air Force should buy a low-cost fighter to replace some of its F-16s instead of purchasing F-35s, Kendall was noncommittal.

“One of the things I think we need to do is take a little bit of time now to sort through the options carefully and do some of that analysis,” he said during an Aug. 13 interview with Defense News. “Make sure we’ve got the requirements right, make sure we’ve got the concepts right for the future and then move as quickly as we can to field those capabilities.”

Finding the right mix

When the U.S. Air Force fought in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, it operated a fleet of about 4,000 fighters. Fast forward to 2021, and that inventory has shrunk to 2,000 aircraft with an average age of 28 years, said Air Combat Command chief Gen. Mark Kelly in an Aug. 16 interview with Defense News.

To win against a near-peer nation like Russia or China, the U.S. needs “high capability, high capacity and affordability,” he said.

“We have to be able to compete and fight well beyond the permissive counterinsurgency environments we’ve operated in for the last 20 years,” he added. “That takes a range of capabilities.”

The Air Force’s tactical aircraft study is meant to help the service identify the right mix of fighters needed to thwart advanced threats in 2030 and beyond, while at the same time establishing a plan for drawing down the large number of legacy aircraft types that put pressure on operations and maintenance accounts.

The study was first acknowledged by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. CQ Brown in February.

“I don’t know that I’ll come to an answer that here’s the exact mix,” Brown said at a May event. “I want to get us shaped in a direction because right now we have seven fighter fleets. My intent is to get down to about four.”

The service completed the first draft of the study, but Kendall has asked for additional analysis, said Lt. Gen. Clinton Hinote, the deputy chief of staff for strategy, integration and requirements.

The Office of the Secretary of Defense, which is performing several evaluations of its own, will also scrutinize the Air Force’s study. And the Pentagon’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office is carrying out a review of the Air Force’s and Navy’s sixth-generation fighter programs, which will evaluate the associated acquisition strategies, costs, technical maturity and schedule risks.

CAPE is also analyzing the Air Force’s “Digital Century Series” business case, a potential NGAD acquisition strategy through which aircraft manufacturers would continuously develop new fighter designs and compete to build small batches of that aircraft. During a July hearing, acting CAPE director Joseph Nogueira told lawmakers that study could be finished as early as August, but a public update on its status was unavailable by press time.

How low can it go?

Reports vary on how low the F-35 program of record could fall.

Internal documents by the Air Force’s future war-fighting cell indicated a plan to curb orders at 1,050 jets, Aviation Week reported in December. Will Roper, the Air Force’s acquisition executive during the Trump administration, called for F-35 purchases to be capped at about 800 units, CNN reported in May.

Any attempt to cut the program of record will face a difficult fight in Congress — particularly from lawmakers whose districts economically benefit from the jet’s production and who have successfully increased F-35 procurement beyond the Defense Department’s budget request since 2015.

That tradition may be in jeopardy as powerful lawmakers like House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith, D-Wash., criticize the cost of operating, sustaining and upgrading the jet. But it remains to be seen whether Congress would be amenable to a cut to the overall buy, Harrison said.

“Earlier this year, we started hearing a lot more negative sentiment coming out of Congress about the F-35 program, and quite frankly the Air Force has seemed to soften on the program as well,” he said. “That may be a sign that congressional winds are shifting, that sentiment for the F-35 may have peaked. … But it may be too soon to call it. Negative talk does not necessarily translate into negative appropriations.”

Any changes to the program that result in cost growth could be anathema to lawmakers. F-35 manufacturer Lockheed Martin has spent more than a decade trying to lower the price of the F-35A to $80 million or less, on par with a fourth-generation fighter. It finally accomplished that goal in a 2019 deal for the 13th batch of aircraft, after years of ramping up production and benefiting from economies of scale.

While Lockheed could argue cuts to the F-35 program might result in higher costs, analysts said the company will have to show its work. Unit costs for the aircraft are unlikely to fall much further than the current price of $78 million per F-35A, Aboulafia said. To keep unit costs stable while reducing the overall buy, the Air Force could simply sustain its current production rate and cut off procurement early, Harrison explained.

Aboulafia added that while the cost of sustaining small aircraft fleets is “ruinous,” there may not be much financial benefit for sustaining 1,763 F-35As compared to a fleet around half that size.

In a statement, Lockheed Martin spokesman Brett Ashworth said the cost of the F-35 shouldn’t be the only criteria for evaluating the aircraft’s value. Instead, the Air Force needs to consider the “cost per effect.”

“The F-35 is the only aircraft in the world with the ability to get to the fight undetected, then gather, synthesize and share information with not only other aircraft, but units on the ground as well,” Ashworth said. “The F-35′s procurement costs include the sensors necessary to accomplish this mission, as well as the modernization and sustainment costs to maintain them. No fourth-generation aircraft can offer a similar capability. And the fight of tomorrow will only be more difficult and dangerous as next-generation threats evolve.”

Not all analysts agree the F-35 should be targeted for cuts. While the Air Force is right to reduce the number of tactical aircraft platforms it flies, it’s undervaluing the capability a stealthy, highly networked fighter like the F-35 would bring to a battle with a sophisticated adversary like China, said Rebecca Grant, an aerospace analyst with IRIS Independent Research.

“Let’s get the most sophisticated war-fighting platform that’s in full production, and let’s buy all of those,” she said. “Put the money into F-35 because you know that platform is useful for your newcomers — your unmanned [aircraft], your [expendable drones], your hypersonic weapons.”

Instead of following Brown’s plan to pare down the fighter fleet to four platforms, Grant contended the Air Force should retire the A-10, cancel the F-15EX program and replace all of its F-16s with F-35s.

“Stop making [a] self-imposed affordability number from 20 years ago their key war-fighting requirement,” she recommended. “Stop designing the future war-fighting force with cost as the dominant variable while throwing out [the requirement for] penetrating enemy airspace.”

To successfully argue the F-35 program should be cut, both Harrison and Aboulafia said the Air Force must shed more light on the “missing variables” of its future fighter proposal. Specifically, it needs to clarify details about plans to replace early block F-16s and field the sixth-generation NGAD family of systems.

“A lot is going to hinge on: Can they show Congress that they have a credible replacement for capabilities?” Harrison said.

So far, the Air Force has kept most information about NGAD under wraps, including what technologies will make up the family of systems, how much it will cost, how many will be purchased and when it will be fielded.

Meanwhile, Brown said new design and manufacturing techniques, such as digital engineering, could allow the service to develop a “four-and-a-half-[generation] or fifth-gen-minus” fighter to replace early block F-16s at a lower cost than the F-35.

However, Harrison is skeptical such an aircraft could be built at a cheaper price tag than the advanced F-16s rolling off Lockheed Martin’s production line in Greenville, South Carolina.

“That just doesn’t seem to hold a lot of water, the idea that we could somehow now make a fourth-gen aircraft cheaper than these existing fourth-gen platforms that are way down the learning curve already, and their development is already a sunk cost,” Harrison said.

The particulars of how many or what types of fighters the Air Force will need are uncertain, but one thing is clear, said Kelly: Going forward, the service will have to walk a tightrope, balancing the capability and number of aircraft it needs with what it can afford.

“I don’t see any of the programs accelerating or expanding into these big exponential increases in a buy, just because of the realities of the budget,” he said.

Last September, the Air Force disclosed that a full-scale NGAD demonstrator had already flown, signaling that the program is further along than most outside aerospace analysts predicted.

Kelly — a major supporter of the NGAD program — isn’t sure when the service will be able to divulge more about the highly classified system of systems, which could include new manned and unmanned aircraft, advanced weapons, and sensors.

“I’m as keen to get as much as feasibly possible [into the open], commensurate with program security requirements, because I think frankly the more people know [about] the requirement and the capability, the better we will be from a programmatic standpoint,” he said.

Defense News caught up with Kelly during an Aug. 16 interview. Here’s what he had to say about one of the most advanced combat aircraft under development by the service, while also sharing his thoughts on one of the oldest planes still in operation.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

You’ve been vocal about how important it is to keep the NGAD program fully funded and on schedule. Why is that program so exciting to you from an operational standpoint?

The peer threat for the last 70 years has been Russia or the Soviet Union, and the technologies we faced included a very limited section of the electromagnetic spectrum. So if you look at the design criteria — what shaped the F-15 and the F-22 fighter jet development in terms of threat, available technology and environment — it was the Soviet Union, European basing and aerospace, and front-quarter, mechanically scanned X-band sensors.

We need to move beyond just the Russian threat, move beyond just European basic airspace engagement ranges, and beyond ‘80s and ‘90s technology and defeating a mechanically scanned, single-band sensor. So while Russia remains a threat, we now face new adversaries, longer distances in the Asia-Pacific region and a much wider utilization of the electromagnetic spectrum. That requires long-range capabilities that can sense, shoot and thrive in a multispectral environment.

What challenges does the NGAD program face?

I can think of three that begin with C: classification, cost and COVID-19.

The high classification makes it impossible to discuss in an open forum for the most part. COVID makes it tough to get really important people in small, confined spaces like a vault that we need to talk to, just because of the concerns of the pandemic. And then nothing that’s high-tech is cheap. But when it comes to NGAD, it’s not cheap, but it’s significantly cheaper than losing.

We haven’t heard much about the Air Force’s plans to replace its intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft, which includes the E-8C JSTARS ground surveillance jet, E-3 airborne warning and control plane, and unmanned assets like the MQ-9 Reaper and RQ-4 Global Hawk. What is the plan there?

With respect to some of our [ISR] platforms — for example, like AWACS, JSTARS, U-2 — just like with the fighter fleet, very few of them are young. Look at specifically the AWACS and JSTARS: They’re 707 airframes, and there’s exactly zero airlines around the globe that fly the 707 as a money-producing airline because you can’t. If you look at a global supply chain trying to sustain a 707 airframe, compared to sustaining a P-8, which is on a 737 airframe: There’s 6,800 737s around the globe with a global supply chain.

If anybody asked me what’s my priority in the ISR portfolio, I have to say the AWACS. We frankly have to be wide-eyed. We have to acknowledge that unlike our closest treaty allies — the Australians and the [U.K. Royal Air Force]— we do not field a cutting-edge, air moving target indicator, or AMTI, capability like they do with their E-7A Wedgetail.

In my opinion, you’re not a true fifth-gen Air Force until your fifth-gen fighters have fifth-gen weapons and fifth-gen sensing, like an AMTI [aircraft] to go with them. We’ve got to make sure we’ve got the surveillance piece and the weapons piece to go with our platform piece.

Other Air Force officials advocated for the service to buy Wedgetail, but the necessary funding never ended up in the budget. Meanwhile, the AWACS inventory is only getting older. How long can the service go without replacing AWACS?

It’s not a trivial piece of equipment that our great airmen sustain — and when I say airmen, I mean from the airman first class on the flight line to [maintainers in] the back shops to the great depot workers at Tinker [Air Force Base in Oklahoma]. They’re the miracle workers every day.

We are in the single-digit number of years before that airplane votes with its wings and votes with its metal structure that it’s just not viable to operate and sustain any longer.

To your point about Wedgetail, I frankly don’t know exactly where our budgets are going to fall when it hits the reality of what we actually have [available]. But I can tell you unambiguously that it stays pretty much close to my No. 1 requirement as a force provider.