Kendall, NGAD, & the Acquisition Mindset that Must Go

NGAD v F/A-18

Why did we build LCS around the never-was-has-been NLOS? Why do we have three white elephants in the fleet? Why, four decades after the end of the Cold War, are all our tactical aircraft derived from Cold War era designs? Why, when we find ourselves needing the ability for submarines to be able to lay mines and fire anti-ship cruise missiles, the submarines that we have in production can do neither?

Simple, a mindset. A self-destructive mindset that not only thinks it knows what the future is, it is terrified into paralysis to do anything to prepare for it today. If you take arrogance and blend it with insecurity, you about have it.

The US military can be a learning institution. The US Navy and USAF years ago decided to part ways for their next fighter aircraft. In a way, it is a confession of what most will admit in hushed tones: we don’t want a repeat of the less-than-optimal result from the F-35A/B/C. In the end analysis, the product was the result of a cascading series of compromises that begat the flawed but still pretty good.

We were lucky in that history gave us a bit of a holiday from serious competition. We didn’t really save all that much money that we were promised (again), and the USAF, USN, and USMC would all have better designs for their missions if they were allowed to go their own path, but here we are. Good enough.

In 2025, we don’t have that luxury as the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is rapidly moving through iterations of new systems closing the quality and capabilities gap now that they are well past the numerical advantage.

With the next fighter aircraft for the U.S., the USAF went the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) direction—to make another acronym if nothing else—that became the F-47.

Editorial note: I am still upset that we broke proper naming convention with the jump to F-35 when it should have been F-24, and I am even less of a fan of the jump to F-47. It just isn’t wise, and frankly, a bit insulting. I am hoping that the US Navy will make the F/A-X the F-24…because it will make people think of the F-14, and that number is available, logical, and will not cause eye rolls for decades to follow.

The US Navy is, for now, calling its next fighter the F/A-XX. Makes more sense, though I hope we just skip the F/A and just make it F. Simple is better, and as I’ll cover later on in the post...I like what NAVAIR is saying about its focus. It is throwing a bone of hope to the remaining TomorrowLand Transformationalists™

One of the worst byproducts of the McNamara-mindset mated with the green-eyeshade accountancy primacy in acquisitions has been the joint-uber-alles approach that gave us all sorts of slow, suboptimal, single point of failure programs.

Spreading program risk around is a great core principle, and this dual fighter program is smart just for that fact alone.

This doesn’t mean we’ve learned all our lessons from the failures and sub-optimal platforms—where only a few left the billion $ PPT slides to displace water and make shadows on the ramp—no. We still have to fight an entrenched mindset that sounds so good, but fails to produce time after time after time.

A perfect example is a recent article on the now F-47 by former Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall.

I’ll let you read the full thing, but let me point out the mindset that simply needs to be dropped in to the dustbin of history.

Stop slowly drowning the good now for the promised perfect later. We never get there, and we’ve run out of time to hope that it does.

As outgoing secretary of the Air Force in the Biden administration, I had the opportunity to make that decision but I chose to defer it until after the presidential election.

…

But Congress needs to look beyond the obvious appeal of this advanced aircraft and ask the Trump administration some hard questions: Is this the right airplane for our defense strategy? Is it affordable? Does it displace higher priorities? I deferred the NGAD decision because I didn’t have those answers before I left the Department of the Air Force — and it’s unclear whether the Trump administration has them now.

In the name of all that is holy, Frank. The program is a decade old already. The first prototype flew five years ago. In the years that followed, three different prototypes have flown.

F-22 ended production fourteen years ago. The backbone of our fighter fleet, F-16 and F-15, date back to the productive years before Goldwater-Nichols in the 1970s. The F-35 may be slow-rolling into US and allied service, but it is not a “new” bird by any stretch.

Meanwhile, the PRC, year by year, is closing the technology and capability gap. They already have us in numbers. We’ve used up our luxury of time through analysis paralysis. Time to place our bets and move forward.

…and yes, I’m going to post this again.

While I’m at it…

Analysis paralysis begat by sexy industry promises, boosted by excessive reading of military science fiction, unbounded by military experience it a great way to lose the next war.

What do you do with this level of paralyzing anxiety at the highest levels of leadership?

We don’t know what conflicts or warfighting scenarios will drive the Trump administration’s defense investments. PCA designs are based on the need to take the air superiority fight deep into heavily defended enemy territory, but we have to ask: Is this a sound planning scenario for nuclear powers like China or Russia? If the Trump administration’s strategy emphasizes homeland security and defensive scenarios, wouldn’t a lower cost design more focused on Defensive Counter-Air, or DCA, make more sense? Would a multirole next-generation design, like the F-35, make more sense? Would an aircraft designed to work with uncrewed tactical aircraft, like the Air Force uncrewed collaborative combat aircraft, make more sense? The decision to buy the F-47 needs to be the right choice for the future — this is the only new crewed fighter aircraft the Air Force will likely pursue for a long time.

No one knows what the future holds. As a matter of fact, “we” are horrible at knowing exactly what the next war will be or what conflict our nation will have to face.

What we can do is look at the spectrum of types of conflict we may face. History shows that the next conflict will have a flavor of previous conflicts. Best to have a force that is flexible and a mindset looking at future requirements, but firmly rooted in the lessons of the recent past.

What is a lesson over and over? You better attain and maintain air supremacy or at least air superiority if you want to fight the war the way the rest of the US military is structured to fight.

“PCA” is, of course, another acronym crutch-for-thinking that stands for “Penetrating Counter Air.”

• WWII: think P-51;

• Korean War: think F-86;

• Vietnam War: think F-4;

• Various American and Israeli wars of the last 40 years: think our teenagers F-14/15/16.

See a trend here? Think we are OVERDUE for “Penetrating Counter Air” war today…as the smart money says that wherever the next major war is, we’re going to need that?

Also, putting a halt due to the mirage of the “Collaborative Combat Aircraft” (CCA) that simply is not ready for primetime today and may never be operationally useful? Do we wait another decade? Really?

Congress should also consider whether the Trump administration’s future year defense plan and budget will prioritize higher priority investments than the F-47. When I left the Pentagon, the Department of the Air Force had a list of unfunded strategic priorities that were higher priority than NGAD. At the top of the list were counter-space weapons and airbase defense. Neither of these is a direct Air Force responsibility, but both are critical to the success of the entire Joint Force. China is well on its way to fielding robust space-based targeting systems that threaten all of our land- and sea-based forces. We must acquire counter-space systems at scale or China will be able to target all of our assets at sea and on the ground with impunity and in real time. China also has an ever-expanding arsenal of sophisticated weapons ready to strike our airbases in the Pacific. Those bases are limited in numbers, not well defended and each is subject to attack by literally hundreds of missiles of all types. Our new F-47s — and all of our forward-based aircraft — will never get off the ground if we don’t address these threats through substantial budget increases.

One can walk and chew gum at the same time.

Congress must ensure that the Trump administration provides the needed support for the F-47 decision. Until then, the jury is still out on whether the F-47 contract should have been awarded.

The F-47 is a product of Obama, Trump45, Biden, and Trump47, if you must look at it that way…but it is actually a USAF project. Everyone in the program, until a few months ago, worked for Frank. It is about as accurate as calling the uplift of forces that began in mid-2008 in Afghanistan the “Obama Surge”. Just ahistorical and cringy.

Repeating “Trump” like it is some verbal-tic just degrades from what should be a serious discussion, but as Frank was a political appointee of the Biden Administration, I guess petty partisanship comes with the territory.

After reading this article three times, I’m starting to understand better why so many modernization efforts in the USAF either are cancelled or get frozen in programmatic aspic.

Anyway, after Frank got me in a grumpy mood, this article came across the transom: Tyler Rogoway’s, Navy Won’t Scramble To Field Loyal Wingman Drones Like The Air Force.

Chew a bit on this quote from Rear Adm. Michael “Buzz” Donnelly, USN, Director of the Air Warfare Division (N98):

“The United States Navy is in a tri-service memorandum of agreement and understanding with our sister services, the U.S. Air Force, as well as the Marine Corps, and we are developing that capability together. Each of us are focused on a different aspect of that. The Air Force is leading and very forward leaning in the development of the actual air vehicle and the autonomy that goes in those for execution of mission. Marine Corps is working closely to develop manned-unmanned teaming between platforms such as the F-35, the F-35B being the baseline for their aviation capability right now. And the United States Navy is working based on our pathway of unmanned into the fleet with MQ-25. The baseline architecture that will be required to enable those capabilities, as well as the ground control station that we are currently utilizing for MQ-25, we expect to become the standard for all of these systems.

As we work together for the United States Navy, I will tell you that we are definitely in the follow of those three services as we look to see how Air Force is developing and fielding things, quite frankly, in a more simple operational environment than what is required for a ship-based system. We know that we’re going to leverage what we learned in MQ-25 as a pathway of unmanned into the Carrier Air Wing and operating in the fleet over the next coming years, and then between what we see as mission capability, understanding of autonomy and the function of that in the mission capabilities, and what we’ve learned with MQ-25, I think it’s foreseeable that we’re going to see initial designs and capabilities fielding to the fleet in the 2030s.”

This is…sound. Yes, my well established pouting about what we did and did not do with the X-47B a dozen years ago that cost us a decade of learning stands, but today is today and the above seems…sound. Slow, but sound.

Because we have used up all the temporal-slack in the timeline, the bias should be towards action now while leaving the option open for other things as technology matures. This I can defend.

This also appears to be, with the F-47, the same approach of the USAF.

The USAF and USN both share a general hesitancy about the maturity of unmanned systems right now, but are looking at how to use them in slightly different ways.

Good.

This difference is good, because they are competing ideas and perspectives, and competition brings better results. One of them will produce the better idea, and can be copied by others. The US military won’t have a single point of failure. It is, in a way, an admission that we can’t see the future perfectly, but we can try different paths to get there. When the future arrives, we will then see which was the better path.

“Man proceeds in the fog. But when he looks back to judge people of the past, he sees no fog on their path. From his present, which was their faraway future, their path looks perfectly clear to him, good visibility all the way. Looking back, he sees the path, he sees the people proceeding, he sees their mistakes, but not the fog.”

— Milan Kundera

Unless there is something real sexy in the SCIF, I think we are overpromising and overdelivering the popularity of the unmanned concept. Those responsible for making shadows on the ramp appreciate this, but they have to watch their back from the TomorrowLand Transformationalists™ as demonstrated by Frank Kendall’s mindset. Hedging as to not make them mad is a good instinct.

The Navy is currently looking to have its air wings made up of more drones than manned aircraft by sometime in the later end of the 2030s, so CCAs and similar systems are still likely to come. But for now, the service is concentrating on getting the drone it has already ordered — which is late and over budget — integrated into the carrier environment while taking more of a wait-and-see approach for others.

Of course, this is taking Donnelly’s statement at face value. It’s unclear what the Navy is doing in the classified domain. Still, his remarks today were very clear and blunt on the issue.

This also calls into question the F/A-XX sixth-generation fighter aircraft the service is supposedly about to award a contract for anytime now. That aircraft has been slated to work alongside CCAs as a key feature. The timing of its development and the Navy’s eventual movement on that capability remains murky at best. Since Navy and Air Force fighter aircraft will be able to use each other’s CCAs, it’s possible that leveraging Air Force types could be a gateway early on in the naval fighter’s service if the Navy’s own CCA drones have not arrived in force on carrier decks by that time. Still, the carrier not having its own CCAs would severely limit the utility and applicability of the F/A-XX’s manned-unmanned teaming capabilities.

I may be reading this wrong, but between the lines it appears that a lot of the engineering issues are getting in the way of the exquisite future some want. Reality is leaning to a more humble, but useful embrace. Want CCA? Let’s see what 2035 has to say, but for today—let’s build.

Finally, from much of what we have seen, the Navy seems to be interested in cheaper and more disposable CCAs than the Air Force, which is pursuing a much higher-end capability with unit costs in the tens of millions. This came up again today at the conference, with the possibility of buying CCAs with very short airframe life at lower costs being an attractive option for the service. So, while much of the command and control architecture and some of the tactics, logistics and procedures may port over, the USAF may end up with a very different CCA vision than the Navy and possibly the USMC.

That is starting to look for what I was calling for eight years ago in 2017.

We should be working on something that we can afford to lose and we can stack, Pringles-like, in the hangar deck like Cylon Raiders on a Basestar.

But for now, we need F-47 and whatever we designate the F/A-XX as. We need them now. We need them in number.

For the unmanned portion? Build a little, test a little, learn a lot.

More Rear Admiral Wayne E. Meyer, USN, less Frank Kendall.