NGAD Program is coming soon

The Air Force’s top-secret program, Next Generation Air Dominance Fighter Jet program has started to the next step, It will conduct  engineering and manufacturing development phase, Secretary Frank Kendall said Wednesday.

In a discussion at the Heritage Foundation, Kendall said the Air Force began manufacturing early experimental prototypes at NGAD in 2015 when he was the Pentagon’s lead acquisitions officer. It’s essentially an X-plane program, he said, designed to reduce risk and develop key technologies needed for the production program.

Technology is constantly evolving, he said, and the NGAD effort is now envisioned as a “family of systems” incorporating several elements, including multiple autonomous drones accompanying manned aircraft in formation.

It typically takes the Air Force’s acquisition program nearly seven years to achieve initial operational capability from the start of the Merck phase. Although the service has been working at NGAD for that long, as it is just starting to work on the EMD phase, it will still be a few more years before the program reaches IOC.

“The clock really didn’t start in 2015; it starts around now,” Kendall said. “We think we’ll have the capability by the end of the decade.”

But NGAD will be the largest of taking defense budget in history. Kendall told lawmakers in April each plane piloted under the program would likely cost several hundred million dollars each.

The Air Force asked Congress for nearly $1.7 billion for NGAD in its fiscal 2023 budget, including $133 million in research, development, testing, and evaluation funding.

Kendall also indicated in remarks on Wednesday that she wanted the Air Force’s acquisition program to move more quickly into production. Too often, he said, it took years to reach that stage, and he instructed the Air Force to program it in a way that provided meaningful capabilities to pilots as soon as possible.

NGAD Demo

“I’m not interested in demos and experiments unless they’re an important step towards real capability,” Kendall said. Because of that, The Air Force must conduct the demo to begin NGAD Development Program soon or wait until next year. That thing must to do decrease the risk of production in someday.

And, he says, he has a “sense of urgency” about the need to get cutting-edge capabilities, such as unmanned fighter aircraft accompanying manned aircraft, into the field so that he is willing to take more risks.