The Pentagon will ask for the authority and funding to develop a prototype next-generation aircraft, the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics said Wednesday.
“It will be in the budget,” Frank Kendall told the House Armed Services Committee, in a rare reveal of one of the department’s asks prior to the budget’s formal release next week.
“We want something that is going to give us air dominance for another generation,” Kendall said. The requirements for the new platform will be developed with the “high end fight of the future” in mind, he said.
“The program will be led by DARPA and involve the Navy and Air Force “to develop prototypes for their next planes … variants focused on their requirements.”
The sixth-generation fighter would be a follow-on to the Air Force’s F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, and would be developed specifically to counter the quickly evolving anti-aircraft and air defense capabilities being modernized in countries such as China and Russia.The budget request will also include a line to allow DARPA to being developing a next –generation jet engine for the aircraft, Kendall said.
Giving DARPA the lead on developing the engine and aircraft should improve its acquisition process by having the agency “do the upfront work,” which would reduce lead times, Kendall said.
Wednesday’s hearing is the formal launch of HASC Chairman Rep. Mac Thornberry’s effort to reform the DOD current acquisition process, which he said not only creates fiscal risk through program delays and cost overruns, but creates strategic risk because the nation is getting to the point where it can no longer field systems in time to meet current and evolving threats.
U.S. systems are becoming outpaced by “near peers” — countries like China and Russia who in recent decades fell behind U.S. capabilities but who have put enormous amounts of spending into modernizing their capabilities, with an eye specifically on knocking out U.S. air assets to remove its air dominance, target U.S. space capabilities, and its ability to project power through its aircraft carriers.
The hearing coincided with each of the service chiefs testifying to the Senate on the limits of their forces’ ability to meet growing threats due to budget cuts.
“We are at risk and it is getting worse,” Kendall said. Both countries are developing capabilities “very consciously to defeat the American way of projecting power. This problem of this change is that is going faster and faster and we are having problem keep up with it.”
Thornberry said that given the threat environment, “acquisition reform will be a major part of this committee’s agenda.”
“We are challenged by our own system, which is too slow, too cumbersome, too wasteful, and too frustrating for those in it and all of those who depend on it,” Thornberry said. “If we cannot keep up, we will not have the military capability we need when we need it and the danger to our military personnel will be increased.”
The bipartisan effort has traction in both the House and Senate, and a favorable reception within the Pentagon, where both incoming Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work and Kendall all have long backgrounds in weapons acquisition and defense reform. For almost a year prior to rising to HASC chair, Thornberry and his staff have met behind the scenes with DOD officials, defense contractors and the services to shape this year’s efforts.
HASC ranking member Adam Smith said that acquisition reform was critical, “particularly in this environment we find ourselves in, we cannot say things are getting less threatening. The opposite is happening,” he said.
