Stealth and speed aren’t high on the wish list for the Navy’s sixth-generation fighter. Unmanned versions and a hefty arsenal are, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert said Wednesday.
“The next-generation fighter, I think, has to have a manned and unmanned feature … perhaps be interchangeable,” Greenert said in a speech to hundreds of defense industry representatives at the Naval Future Force Science and Technology Expo. The new fighter, in Greenert’s view, needs a focus on firepower to break through the radar, anti-aircraft missiles and other enemy defenses of the future, meaning an overwhelming payload that would “get the required access, probably by suppressing enemy air defenses.”
With the Navy’s focus on punching through a denied area, a plane’s stealth and speed would not become as high of a priority, he said.
“I don’t see that it’s going to be super-duper fast. Because you can’t outrun missiles. And you can’t become so stealthy that you become invisible — you are going to generate a signature of some sort … 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. That is one way to confuse [enemy capabilities], or suppress it, and provide a means of access.”
It is not known whether the push for the unmanned version will get as much support from the Air Force, which has described the new platform as “beyond a fighter aircraft.” Expected to take 15 years to produce, the aircraft would be a follow on to the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
A prototype for the new fighter, which will be developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and have Air Force and Navy versions, is still in the concept phase. In the fiscal 2016 budget, the Pentagon requested $8 million to move the studies for it forward and requested hundreds of millions more for the future technologies that the Defense Department said the new fighter could benefit from.
