The Air Force’s NGAD fighter’s mistake will be costly

What you need to know: The U.S. military’s procurement system, especially the stalled Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program, is an example of the broader failure of modernization, plagued by delays, budget overruns, and unmet expectations.

-Despite decades of progress, outdated platforms like the F-16 and F-15 still dominate the inventory.

-Past defense procurements have successfully embraced multiple parallel developments, accepting rapid iteration to stay ahead. The current focus on modularity, perfection, and ambitious but delayed programs has weakened U.S. military readiness, allowing adversaries like China and Russia to catch up.

-The Pentagon’s pursuit of perfection has come at the expense of practical, timely innovation, hampering troop readiness.

Why the U.S. Air Force’s NGAD delay is a symptom of larger problems with military procurement

Unfortunately, the recent standstill of the NGAD program is hardly an outlier in the realm of contemporary U.S. defense procurement. On the contrary, it’s just the latest in a long line of overbudget, underperforming, and otherwise failed attempts at modernization, leaving the U.S. military with a fighting force that looks suspiciously unchanged in the past thirty years of technological advancement. . In the case of the US Air Force variants, F-16 and F-15 – not the aircraft they were supposed to replace decades ago still dominate the combat inventory; and after almost fifty years and the scrapping of half the fleet, it is still no new AWACS.

In the case of the US Navy, Harpoon missiles and submarine-launched torpedoes still provide the lion’s share of anti-surface capabilities, despite the now fifteen-year-old turn to China and the arrival of ASBMs, anti-ship drones. and now boost-glide missiles (which the Navy still can’t intercept) in enemy arsenals. The military needs no further explanation, and the sorry state of America’s nuclear forces compared to their Chinese and Russian counterparts is indeed frightening to see.

The fact that the twenty-year technological advantage the Pentagon inherited as the price of victory in 1991 has been well and truly squandered is hardly a moot point. Excuses abound: too many coins, peace dividend, seizure—but the challenges the Chinese and Russian armies faced in (say) the year 2000 were far greater, and somehow she have still managed to modernize their critical capabilities to a much more satisfactory extent. And now, with the unceremonious demise of NGAD, we’re back in the realm of speculative concept art, of fluffy business words like “agility” and “modularity,” and PowerPoint presentations with videos of parrots and starlings taking the place of real planes. .

This was not the case in the past. The period between 1991 and the present is similar to the period between 1957 and 1991. In the USAF inventory, the latter period saw the large-scale production of the B-52, B-58, F-111 and B-1 bombers; the F-4 Phantom, F-105, F-106, F-15 and F-16; the A-7 Corsair, the A-10, F-117, and so on. It is fair to say that ‘modularity’ and adaptability were used where necessary; the Minuteman missile and the many, many KC-135 tanker offshoots are prime examples. At the same time, however, standardization was rarely overrelied on; for example, the Minuteman was developed in parallel with three other missiles that filled the same niche: the Atlas, Titan I and Titan II.

To be fair, this was not a cost-efficient approach; but in the crucial case of the early development of the ICBM, it was necessary to ensure that the failure or delay of a single program could not jeopardize the entire strategic situation. Minuteman was an example of a high-risk, high-reward program that ultimately paid off; but like Atlas and Titan, there were many other programs that weren’t built to last nor built to adapt: ​​programs that were conceived, developed, produced, and discontinued after their benefits faded, well within the span of thirty-four years. Many programs were never completed, but this was rarely a disaster, as by the time a program was canceled there was usually something else in the pipeline that could fill much the same niche.

The argument that the “unprecedented” and “exponentially increasing” pace of technological development today necessitates a different approach is flawed. At first glance, the claim that the state of air warfare has changed more in the last thirty-four years than between 1957 and 1991 (or, for that matter, in the seventeen years between 1944 and 1961 – during which piston-engine bombers were used with high-explosive bombs) seems replaced by intercontinental ballistic missiles with hydrogen bombs) is difficult to sustain; you might even conclude that it is another excuse.

But—more to the point—if Cold War-era American or Soviet air planners were to take a critical look at the progress of the modern USAF, they would probably conclude that we have the whole thing behind us. She would say that a rapid pace of technological development does not require either ‘sustainability’ or “modularity” requires regular, parallel, iterative development, limited design objectives, a degree of redundancy, and a willingness to accept that even the best project will soon have to be replaced on a large scale by something entirely new and better.

The claim that the smaller defense budget of the present necessitates the concentration of technological development in a few generalist and ‘modular’ types is once again an exaggeration. Shorter production runs may be less cost-efficient, but that is not the case That much less efficient. Indeed, the greater combat efficiency that can be achieved through a reduction in unit costs (or more precisely, an increase in quantity for a given investment) must be weighed against the increased unit quality which can be achieved by a shorter production run that is quickly replaced by a new and better type. Indeed, this seems to be more or less what the USAF is going for with whatever the new combat concept is supposed to be – with the caveat that whatever it is is itself a carte blanche at the expense of the unsatisfactory but definitely further – past NGAD.

No doubt the “cheap, modular” approach might be more palatable to penny-pinching members of Congress; but recent history gives us reason to be cautious. In rough economic terms, there is no clear difference between the ‘modularity’ of the F-35, which seeks to simultaneously provide multiple different capabilities in the same airframe, and the ‘modularity’ of a new design, which seeks to offer multiple different capabilities in tandem ( i.e. growth potential). As always, there are two problems with this approach. First, the need to reconcile competing demands will inevitably increase technical risk, potentially leading to a product that is either late, substandard, or both. Second, putting all your eggs in one basket increases the impact of these technical risks if the gamble goes wrong. The F-35 program continues to highlight both dangers to this day.

More importantly, the simple fact that the new fighter will replace the more mature NGAD will guarantee that it will take longer to arrive in large numbers, which is decisive, since when it comes to fighter aircraft, quality is just a function of time. Quantity alone cannot help the United States because any technological advancement will be quickly imitated by the Chinese, who can then exploit their much lower labor costs to produce a similar product at a lower price (as they are doing now with the J- 20). .) As during the Cold War, qualitative superiority is the only attractive option for the US; and qualitative superiority requires new innovations to be deployed quickly. In other words, there is no difference between accepting delays in an advanced program and accepting an inferior product because it is a delayed weapon system is inferior – to the opponent – ​​by the time it is resolved.

Perhaps the Air Force has now found a way to close the loop on “modularity,” but let’s be clear about what “modularity” actually is: It’s many variations of a single airframe, and that concept is as old as the military aviation itself. One of its more extreme manifestations is the F-35, which ultimately arrived about a decade too late in quantity to surpass the Chinese in terms of quality, despite the enormous technological advantage the US enjoyed at the start of its development in 2001. The F-22 arrived (despite all its own delays) so early that there was a gap of about ten years between the end of the production run and full-scale production of the J-20; it therefore provided an asymmetric advantage (that is, a kind of ‘compensation’). If only the F-22 had been produced in greater numbers, and therefore at a lower average unit cost, it would probably be considered a very successful program today.

To give the USAF credit, in all likelihood the NGAD was behind schedule, underperformed, over budget, and otherwise imperfect; but that’s what it was a fighter which one could have been put into service sometime in the next decade – warts and all; produced in modest quantities, and then replaced by something better – something ‘modular’ even. Conversely, what we have now (which looks a lot like nothing) probably won’t show up in the next decade (despite “digital engineering,” another recent buzzword to describe something that already existed), and anyone who says otherwise is most likely intentional lie.