David Axe — The Telegraph June 29, 2024
All of a sudden, the US Air Force is considering cancelling a multibillion-dollar effort to develop a new stealth fighter. Citing the high cost of the so-called “Next-Generation Air Dominance” programme and the competing demands of other projects, USAF leaders have warned they may have no choice but to cancel NGAD – and find other ways of winning control of the air in future wars.
It’s a startling development for advocates of American air power. For generations, the whole US military – not to mention the militaries of America’s closest allies – have depended on the US Air Force to achieve air superiority against even the most determined and sophisticated foe, affording freedom of action for troops on the ground and ships at sea.
For generations, the US Air Force has gained control of the air by fighting for it, jet to jet, with the world’s best air-to-air fighters – and highly-trained pilots. Late in the Cold War and into the 2000s, the Boeing F-15C Eagle fighter was the world’s top fighter. Later, the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor assumed this position.
The last few dozen F-15Cs are finally retiring after five decades of service. The 180 or so F-22s are pushing 20 years old – and won’t last forever. The US Air Force has already asked the US Congress for permission to retire the three dozen least-capable F-22s in order to free up a billion dollars for other priorities – a request lawmakers have denied, for now.
As recently as a year ago, the disappearance of the last few “fourth-generation” F-15Cs and the “fifth-generation” F-22s’ advancing age weren’t crises. The US Air Force had been working for years, mostly in secret, to develop a new “sixth-generation” fighter under the auspices of the NGAD program. The new piloted warplane would combine high speed, long range and radar-evading stealth – and would carry a new generation of powerful missiles while also flying and fighting in formation with AI-controlled drones.
The plan, as of this spring, was for the US Air Force to acquire 200 of the new jets starting in the 2030s. That plan is now falling apart.
The first hint of trouble came on June 13, when USAF Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin suggested service leaders might recommend reconfiguring, delaying or even canceling the NGAD program as part of the US government’s budget for 2026. While lawmakers have yet to finalize the 2025 budget, military leaders are already writing their proposals for the following year.
It’s in 2026 that Allvin said he expects the US Air Force will have to make some hard choices to stick to its usual $200-billion budget. Inflation cut into the service’s purchasing power starting a couple of years ago. And Republican lawmakers who gained control of the US House of Representatives in the 2022 election have been fighting for across-the-board cuts to federal spending. Those and other fiscal forces are creating budgetary headwinds at precisely the same time several major USAF programs are demanding more and more money.
Those programs include a $200-billion effort to build at least 100 new Northrop Grumman B-21 Raider stealth bombers. Production of new tankers, radar early-warning planes, rescue helicopters is also ramping up. But the big problem isn’t these planes – it’s the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II multi-role stealth fighter.
The US Air Force developed the F-35 in the late 1990s and early 2000s as an affordable replacement for the service’s thousands of older F-16 fighters and A-10 attack jets. The plan, all along, has been the US Air Force to buy more than 1,700 F-35s. The F-35 is classified as fifth-generation like the Raptor: it should be more capable than all but a handful of today’s Chinese and Russian aircraft.
But deliveries of the $80-million F-35s to USAF squadrons stalled last year as the US Air Force and Lockheed Martin struggled to complete testing of the type’s latest software. Today there are scores of complete USAF F-35s sitting in storage, awaiting software. That’s billions of dollars worth of fighters that aren’t even available to front-line squadrons.
The cost and timeline for testing the software, installing it and finally delivering those stored keep extending. And while deliveries may resume this summer, it could take another year for Lockheed to hand over the last stored jet.
It’s not for no reason that aviation expert Bill Sweetman refers to the F-35 as a “trillion-dollar trainwreck.” The fighter is eating the US Air Force’s budget – and forcing the service to rethink its next fighter.
It’s still possible the US Air Force proceeds as planned with the NGAD program – or the US Congress forces it to. If the new fighter project falls apart, USAF leaders could piece together other systems into a kind of replacement. F-35s and new F-15EXs could fight for control of the air alongside aging F-22s as new generations of high-performance drones enter service – and prove whether they can shoulder the air-superiority burden.
But that’s risky. Since the advent of air power more than a century ago, manned fighters have controlled the air. It’s safe to assume they’ll continue to control the air. If the US Air Force can’t find a way to develop and field state-of-the-art fighters, it might discover it no longer dominates.
And that could mean some other force dominates, instead. The Chinese air force, for instance.
Sometimes pigs can fly then?
It never defended America anyway, with all the foreign and hostile Yids high up in the US Army
And what will they do with all that antigravity tech TPTB have had since the later 1940s? To say nothing of the holographic tech that was showcased on 9/11 as “aircraft flying into the Twin Towers”.
A moderate sized saucer or triangle deploying holographic emitters could certainly put out “Independence Day” sized “Alien craft” to frighten folk. Indeed in last forty years or so, these larger apparent “flying cities” and the like have been deployed e.g. the Pheonix Lights. Curiously “ET” never “visited in really big craft” in the 1940s and 1950s. Presumably after “thousands of years in advance of us etc…”, they suddenly in the space of a mere twenty years or — after failing in hundreds and thousands so years of previously doing so — were able to develop even larger craft.
…it’s almost as if the apparent increases of ET technology output has matched the advances of our own…but surely not 😊
Will the sheeple buy a fake alien invasion? If they can be coerced into poisoning themselves with the jab, they will buy anything….
what they need this superfluous F-35 for ?
they have the different TR-3B models they
can acieve everything they want with !
Get real, its all staged, this has been planned for decades—ZWOG is disempowering NATO & empowering BRICS–as they terminate the white West/race sometime this century & establish their new Elysium (2013) A.I./wog world.
Mean while the US wastes billions developing new Air Combat Drones from scratch while the Russians are retrofitting AI into pilotless SU57 airframes. That means they will be combat ready years before and at far lower cost that the US’s boondoggle scratch build approach. But hey if you are going to be bankrupted and destroyed that’s the way to do it. I hope all those retirees in the US that are reposing on the beaches of Florida while their defense stock portfolios are giving 2x market average returns enjoy themselves while it lasts. Better learn to говорить по-русски
Unless the military planes are being patrolled to the currently non-existent southern border to mow down everyone and anyone illegally invading, then f*ck ’em.
“But the big problem… it’s the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II multi-role stealth fighter.” … Say it isn’t so! And they’ve known there were serious crippling issues with that shit-bucket for 20 years, especially when the Israelis (you know, our good friends) stole terabytes of data on it that detailed every nuance of that machine then sold the info on the international market. But whatever, that thing has been an ill-conceived lame duck from the get-go. The pilots would probably be better off flying the rickety biplanes my grandfather flew in WWI, for the wrong f*cking side, as at least the machine guns would work.
Then we were treated to this shit pie to the face, “$200-billion effort to build at least 100 new Northrop Grumman B-21 Raider stealth bombers.” Ummm $200 billion for 100 airplanes?!? Fuuuuuuuck Yoooooouuuuuu. Anyone and everyone at the Pentagram and Cuntgress who goes along with that deserves to be thrown into the streets, gutted like cheap fish, and strangled with their own intestines.
Simon Smith–Earth might be important to ETs for maintaining and developing their Space-craft. You need a busy planet like Earth to have a good garage. A lot of work can be done underground; GB and USA were very surprised about what the Germans had achieved at Pennemunde
The Russians can now create a no fly zone so apart from the basic facts that the US is in retardation mode via corruption and subversion the article is total crap a mainstay of western media.
Probably Peenemunde, and with an umlaut