MILTECH - The Air Force's secretive and highly classified Next Generation Air Dominance fighter program has entered a critical engineering and manufacturing development phase, Secretary Frank Kendall said Wednesday.
During an interview with the Heritage Foundation, Kendall said that the Air Force began during the prototyping test at NGAD in 2015, when he was the Pentagon's chief procurement officer. It was essentially the X-Plane program, he said, designed to reduce risk and develop the technologies needed for industrial programs.
Technology has continued to advance, he said, and NGAD's efforts are now seen as a "family of systems" that involve many things, including a small number of autonomous drones that follow the flight of people who work. It takes nearly seven years for the Air Force acquisition program to reach initial operational capability from the start of the EMD process. Although the project has been in the works at NGAD for about as long as it started work in the EMD era, it will be several years before the program reaches the IOC. “Of course, the clock didn't start in 2015; it's starting to get really big now," Kendall said. "We believe we'll be able to by the end of the decade."
But NGAD may also be the most expensive aviation event in history. Kendall told lawmakers in April that each plane flying under the program would cost hundreds of millions of dollars each.
The Air Force asked Congress for nearly $1.7 billion for NGAD in the 2023 budget, including $133 million in research, development, testing and evaluation. Kendall also indicated in his statement on Wednesday that he wants the Air Force acquisition program to go into production quickly. Often, he said, it takes years to get there, and he called on the Air Force to put programs in place to get valuable skills to Airmen as soon as possible. "I'm not interested in demos and experiments unless they're important steps on the road to real capacity," Kendall said. “What we usually do is to make a quick demonstration and then we have to start the EMD or the development program and wait for several more years because we have not started the development work. If we don't need it to reduce risk, we should go directly to development for production and get there as quickly as possible.
But, he said, he has such a "sense of urgency" about the need to acquire critical capabilities, such as unmanned military aircraft following manned aircraft, that he is willing to accept another risk.
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