In the past, the U.S. Air Force has estimated a unit cost of several hundred million dollars for the manned Next Generation Air Dominance Fighter (NGAD), but Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said on Monday that he is targeting a unit cost of the Lockheed Martin [LMT] F-35 or lower.
The unit cost of the F-35 ranges between $80 million and $90 million, depending on the military service variant and lot number.
“We haven’t set a [manned NGAD] number or threshold,” Kendall told reporters in response to a question at the Air and Space Forces Association’s annual Air, Space, and Cyber conference at National Harbor, Md. “I’ll just give you this off the top of my head. The F-35 kind of represents to me the upper bounds of what we’d like for that [air-to-air] mission. The F-15EX and the F-35 are roughly in the same cost category. I’d like to go lower though.”
The Air Force is deciding on whether manned NGAD will go forward–a decision in the coming months that is to gain insights from an Air Force NGAD panel headed by Tim Grayson, a special assistant to Kendall and a former head of DARPA’s strategic technology office and CIA intelligence officer. Others on the NGAD panel include former Air Force Chief of Staffs David Goldfein, John Jumper and Norton Schwartz; former DoD acquisition chief Paul Kaminski; former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Ralston; and Natalie Crawford, a specialist in air and space policy at RAND.
The Air Force has talked about 3 to 5 Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) under the control of an F-35 or manned NGAD for the air-to-air mission, but Kendall said on Monday that the conceptual number of CCAs per manned fighter is now higher.
Anduril Industries and General Atomics are under contract for the first batch of CCAs.
“Once you start integrating CCAs and transferring some mission equipment and capability functions to the CCAs, then we can talk about a different concept potentially for the crewed fighter that’s controlling them,” Kendall said on Monday. “We need a unit cost that’s affordable in significant [platform] numbers.”
The CCAs would be within communications line-of-sight (LOS) of a manned platform, Kendall said. That distance is about 18 miles.
“One of the things you have to have if you’re gonna use CCAs and have them be armed and lethal is they have to be under tight control,” Kendall said on Monday. “For me, one of the elements of that is it needs to be line-of-sight communications, and I think that’s an important thing to have in the mix–secure, reliable, line-of-sight communications.”
A communications LOS between CCAs and a manned platform would seem to suggest that the service is concerned about the vulnerability of satellite links to jamming. Other than unit cost concerns, the panel review on manned NGAD and its requirements may have stemmed from China’s technological advances in the last 18 months, possibly in integrated air defenses.