The Bunker: Plane Truths

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DOLLAR DOGFIGHT

Could the Air Force’s new replacement fighter be cheaper than the F-35?

Those of us with a ringside seat at the Pentagon follies enjoy comedy, mostly because it is in such short supply. But there were plenty of guffaws to go round last week. “Air Force wants NGAD to cost no more than an F-35. Is that even possible?” chortled Defense One, after Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said he wants his service’s Next Generation Air Dominance (PDF) fighter to cost less than the troubled F-35 fighter his service is now buying. “Kendall: New, Re-Imagined NGAD Could Cost Less Than an F-35,” Air & Space Forces Magazine chuckled.

This happened after Kendall committed truth in 2022 when he revealed each still-super-secret NGAD fighter would cost “multiple” hundreds of millions of dollars — perhaps triple the F-35’s roughly $90 million price tag (not including floormats and R&D). Apparently, the Air Force now realizes it has run into fiscal-reality headwinds. That’s led Kendall, as they say on Capitol Hill, to revise and extend his remarks. “The F-35 kind of represents, to me,” Kendall said September 16, “the upper bounds of what we’d like to pay.”

Anything is possible of course, but Norm Augustine — who would go on to run Lockheed, the Pentagon's biggest contractor — hit the nail on the head in 1983 when he drafted his 52 mirthful corporate “laws.” Number 16 read (PDF): “In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one aircraft. The aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy, 3.5 days each per week except for leap year, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day.”

So, the Air Force has hit the pause button on the NGAD program, trying to decide the smartest way to temper its capabilities. Reduced range and payload are likely. So is transferring NGAD capabilities to Collaborative Combat Aircraft (PDF) drones, intended to fly into battle alongside piloted NGADs (this sleight of bang may reduce the plane’s cost, but won’t do the same for the Pentagon budget).

“We are not walking away from the core United States Air Force function of providing air superiority,” Kendall told that Air Force confab last week. But the new plane isn’t the Next-Generation Air Superiority fighter. In the Air Force’s informal Madison Avenue hangar, dominance has always eclipsed superiority. Looks like Kendall & Co. — civilians, in other words — may finally be yanking the reins on the constellation of four-star Oliver Twists: “Please sir, I want some more.”

Color the defense industry — those contractors that actually will have to build the new plane — skeptical that Kendall can deliver. “That’s not going to happen,” one unnamed insider flatly told Breaking Defense.

But that’s because those nay-sayers lack the requisite exquisite Pentagon imagination. One day after Kendall said he wanted NGAD to cost no more than the F-35, Tony Capaccio of Bloomberg News hinted how it can be done. “Pentagon’s F-35 Cost Rises 10% to $485 Billion to Fix Overheating Engines,” he scooped.

If history is any guide, the ever-escalating cost of the F-35 could top NGAD’s price tag. Whether NGAD’s cost shrinks, or not.

A BOMBER BY ANY OTHER NAME

Whatever happened to that Next-Generation Bomber?

Trying to keep track of Pentagon programs can be challenging. Sure, the Air Force is pressing ahead with a perhaps detuned Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter. But what’s up with its NGB, or Next-Generation Bomber (The Bunker swears you need Ancestry.com or 23andMe to follow these bloodylines)?

Anyway, for those of you who haven’t been paying close attention, it’s a trick question. Turns out, the Next-Generation Bomber was born in 2008 and died the following year. “The term ‘Next-Generation Bomber’ is dead,” Air Force Lieutenant General Philip Breedlove, an overseer of the service’s requirements, declared in 2010.

Another garden-variety bomber was “too conventional” and needed to be replaced by “multiple long-range strike capabilities rather than a single new aircraft with a narrowly defined mission,” National Defense magazine reported at the time. “The latest moniker for the less-exquisite alternative is ‘long-range strike platform.’”

Whatever you call them, piloted planes dropping bombs have been raising questions in some corners of the Pentagon for years. “Nobody has showed me anything that’s required a person in that airplane — nobody,” Marine General James Cartwright said in 2011 when he was serving as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “People come to me and say: ‘If this is one of the legs of the [nuclear] triad, you can’t have it unmanned,’” he said. “I say: ‘Gee, I don’t remember the last time I manned an ICBM or [sub-launched] SLBM or a cruise missile.’ I’m not sure I understand that logic.”

By 2014, the Air Force had begun work on yet another new piloted long-range strike platform. Sure enough, this latest model wasn’t called the “Next-Generation Bomber.” Nor was it labeled the “Long-Range Strike Platform.” Instead, inevitably, it was dubbed the “Long Range Strike Bomber.” In 2015, Northrop landed the contract to build the highly classified plane, since officially rechristened the B-21 Raider.

Early models are now flying around southern California. The Air Force wants to buy at least 100 of the bombers for $550 million a copy, not including those pesky and costly asterisks and caveats. Others, like Robert O’Brien, President Trump’s final national security adviser, argues the Pentagon needs between 300 and 400 of them.

Piloted bombers remain the Lazarus in the Air Force’s Bible.

CHEAPER PLANES

Hardly anyone’s interested…

Funny how fighter and bomber production lines generate a lot of fiscal thrust, both in the Pentagon and the places they’re built. But smaller, less-costly warplanes are pretty much abandoned children when it comes to the Military-Industrial Orphanage.

The Air Force wants 75 cheap ($15 million each) prop-drive light “Armed Overwatch” planes for close-air-support and other decidedly non-supersonic missions, but Congress has been leery. The Government Accountability Office said September 5 (PDF) that there are concerns “surrounding the types of operations the aircraft will conduct, deployment and operating challenges, and affordability.”

Strange how such questions rarely shoot down more high-tech warplanes.

WHAT WE’RE READING

Here’s what has caught The Bunker’s eye recently

→ Threat assessments

The generally hawkish Washington Post editorial page (cf. this September 22 editorial urging President Biden to provide U.S. missiles to Ukraine so it can hit targets deep inside Russia), argued September 20 that the Chinese military has “not reached anything close to parity with the United States by most conventional metrics.”

→ A-war plans

The Air Force will be holding “a tabletop exercise” to prepare for the globe’s expanding roster of possible nuclear-war scenarios, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reported September 19.

→ Barking up the wrong tree

For seven years, the Army taught soldiers at one of its biggest bases that nonprofit groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals were terrorist groups, Army Times’ Nikki Wentling reported September 19.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Mark Thompson has been covering the Pentagon for more than 45 years.