Last week, the Navy had its say on what a sixth-generation fighter should look like, and on Friday, the Air Force joined the discussion.
The Navy envisions heavy firepower and the electronic means to suppress enemy air defenses, while the Air Force imagines a futuristic swarm of autonomous warbirds that explode on target.
Both are part of the initial designing and innovations under consideration as the Department of Defense begins funding the studies and technologies it seeks in a sixth-generation fighter.
“There are different problems that the different services’ air arms face. So you should expect us to come off with different solutions because we’re asked to do different things,” said Lt. Gen. James Holmes, Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategic Plans and Requirements.
The future fighter, which Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work pushed into the spotlight as DOD unrolled its budget last week, isn’t in a design stage yet. In his introduction of the fighter, Work noted the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency would take the initial design lead and develop a prototype for the Air Force and Navy, and would likely take 15 years to develop. The fiscal year 2016 budget allocates $8 million to begin the design and development; and hundreds of millions more are scattered throughout research and development accounts to push forward some of the propulsion and materials technologies it may apply to a future fighter.
There are commonalities among both services’ ideas; for now, stealth is falling as a priority for both the Navy and Air Force as competitors’ technological gains make the once-futuristic technology detectable.
Based on competitors’ gains in radar and sensor technologies, “stealth is necessary, but may not be sufficient,” Gen. Holmes said. “There’s a whole lot of pieces to stealth. We tend to focus on the reduced radar cross section part of it, but there’s an entire spectrum — from your electromagnetic emissions to your [infrared profile].”
Last week, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert said that for him, stealth was not as important as firepower.
Due to the limits of technology and advances by competitors, “you can’t become so stealthy that you become invisible — you are going to generate a signature of some sort,” he said “So you have to deal with that, you have to be able to deploy weapons that are going to be longer range, be smarter and have more of them. I believe you are going to have to do more overwhelming of the defenses, if you will.”
Both the Navy and Air Force are pursuing an unmanned version, with the Air Force considering the autonomous capabilities to enhance a future airframe’s ability to detect and evade air defenses before destroying a target.
“We are not looking at trying to play chess with it,” Holmes said, noting that the autonomy would be narrowly tailored to assist it in contested environments. But looking at the future air-to-air and ground-to-air threats, he said, “you can see some applications for a swarming, autonomous ability to go target surface-to-air defenses. We want to see, does that work, how much would it cost? If it’s expendable, is it worth the cost to pay for autonomy in something that is going to blow itself up when it hits the target? There’s a lot of things we still need to learn.”
Production of an actual warplane is still 15 years out, if the new fighter beats production schedules of its predecessors. The fifth-generation fighter it would follow, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, isn’t in service yet, even though it started its development the same way that the sixth-generation fighter is slated to go — as a DARPA-led program back in 1995.
Since then, the program has faced significant program delays and cost overruns; each airframe is now slated to cost about $100 million and the total cost of the program, including the development and procurement, is estimated to be $323.5 billion.
The U.S. Marine Corps Variant of the fighter, the F-35B, was originally scheduled to be fully operational in March 2012, it is now scheduled to join the service this July. The Air Force variant is slated for 2016; Navy’s variant won’t be ready until 2019.
