What's influencing the Air Force's F-47 and Navy's F/A-XX
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While aviation nerds, stock-market savants and defense analysts await the U.S. Navy's contract award for F/A-XX, consider this:
- The "sixth generation" of fighters will be manned.
- They will be drafted and assembled by the defense industrial base OGs.
- And it will be a long time before they arrive at an airstrip or carrier deck.
Why it matters: This future sounds old-fashioned. Doubly so amid the international drone frenzy.
- But you're not going to replace U.S. airpower with thousands of $500 jerry-rigged unmanned aerial vehicles. Hence the high-low mix.
- And we won't fully grasp the technological leaps of the Air Force's F-47 and the Navy's still-to-be-named warplane for many months or years. Classification has thus far kept specs and selection criteria out of the public eye.
What we're hearing: Choices made on the respective projects reflect a few considerations. They include:
1. A deeply ingrained pilot culture, technologies that are still ripening and hesitancies to let rip unmanned weapons sans any sort of human oversight.
- "The Air Force just isn't ready to say 'OK, unmanned fighter, you're on your own; we're not going to have manned aircraft beyond the F-35,'" Josh Kirshner, a managing director at Beacon Global Strategies, said in an interview.
- "Culturally and tactically, the Air Force just isn't there yet."
2. The concentration of expertise, money and manpower among industry stalwarts, and the familiarity they command with Pentagon buyers.
- Both Next Generation Air Dominance and F/A-XX "possess advanced capabilities that simply can't be replicated by newer defense entrants," Michael Wang at Capstone, an investment research firm, told Axios.
- "These capabilities require significant investment and potentially decades of experience to integrate and operationalize; the idea that a new entrant can displace the primes overnight is dubious."
3. The dynamism of air combat, where split-second gut checks translate to kill or be killed.
- "The nature of aerial warfare is very fluid, and things change very, very rapidly," a retired Air Force lieutenant general told Axios.
- "If you talk to all those UAV pilots who used to be bomber pilots and fighter pilots and stuff, they will tell you there's a small percentage of missing the situational awareness of not being there."
Catch up quick: The Air Force and Navy pursuits of familial, futuristic aircraft are coming to a head, after much clandestine rivalry.
- NGAD winner Boeing was touted by President Trump in an Oval Office address.
- The F/A-XX winner (either Boeing or Northrop Grumman, after Lockheed Martin dipped out) was expected to be named last week. News could now come any day.
- Both will be stealthy and collaborate with robo-wingmen. For the Air Force, Anduril Industries and General Atomics are chipping away with YFQ-44A and YFQ-42A.
What we're watching: Whatever else can be gleaned about F-47 and F/A-XX at the upcoming Sea-Air-Space defense conference in Maryland.
