🔷 Fighter Future Pause

NGAD Paused

After weeks of signaling, the US Air Force announced it is ‘taking a pause’ on its Next-Gen Air Dominance (NGAD) fighter “to figure out whether we’ve got the right design and make sure we’re on the right course.”

The news comes after many weeks of signaling apprehension over cost commitments, which currently has each 6^th-gen fighter costing roughly $300M each. At that price point, a 200-jet fleet translates to a $60B commitment—not including operations, sustainment, or follow-on modernization.

Many of the talking points are framing this as a cost issue—but it’s not that simple.

Cost issue?

The cost should surprise exactly no one.

The fighter’s price has been public since 2022 and framed as ‘hundreds of millions’ apiece. As Secretary Frank Kendall said at the time, “This is a number that’s going to get your attention. It’s going to be an expensive airplane.” With that warning shot, the official solicitation went to industry in 2023, and there was a clear signal that someone would get a production contract in 2024 and field by 2030.

If you believe it’s a cost issue, you’ll also have to acknowledge that the costs have been well-known for years, and the leadership driving this forward has been in place the entire time.

The Air Force has already floated ideas like using a smaller and cheaper engine, which sounds like decoupling the Next-Gen Adaptive Propulsion (NGAP) engine program. If this happens, the price will go down—but so will the platform performance (think 30% less range). That’s likely to force a vehicle redesign to get some range back, forcing a trade of performance. That could take 2-3 years of design work, studies, and analysis to sort out the trade-off balance.

Budget Issue

The cost is a factor but is driven by a macro-level budget issue.

The timing of this signaling makes perfect sense—it's FY26 POM season in the Pentagon. The Program Objective Memorandum (POM) is a funny name for the internal process that builds the FY26 budget request that will be sent to Congress next February. During the process, the Pentagon occasionally sends up trial balloons to get a feel from Congress and industry as they weigh choices with funding constraints.

Planning choices is never fun, but its made worse by a host of Air Force modernization bills all coming due. The largest of those is nuclear modernization, which is taking huge swaths of the service’s budget—including a whopping $45B cost estimate over-run that is likely to get worse once work begins.

Design Issue

Cost and budget dynamics aside, there is a core design issue. The Air Force’s official statement is the pause is to “reconsider the design based on changing threats and affordability.” That said, it’s probably not the “design” that you’re thinking of.

Technology is fueling a rapidly changing threat environment, and the Air Force wants to ensure it has the right program concept, the right design concept, and the right operational concept in place before making a massive commitment. To this point, earlier this year, the Air Force announced an effort to shift all of its new programs from a platform-first to a system-first approach so they can evolve with the pace of technological change (here’s a great clip of Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Allvin explaining it last month).

Reserving the right to evolve the platform every few years sounds like a good idea—so good that was once the plan. This was the premise of the so-called ‘Digital Century Series,’ a framework scrapped in 2022 in favor of a traditional program structure. In a move dripping with irony, this concept is what Gen. Allvin explicitly cited a couple of weeks ago when explaining the system-based approach the service wants to move to.

What Now

Design drives cost, so in many ways, they are intrinsically linked.

That said, don’t expect NGAD to go the way of the Army’s FARA program—they killed a $20B scout helicopter program after watching the war in Ukraine evolve. Secretary Kendall is absolutely confident the Air Force will still do a 6^th-gen crewed aircraft—he’s just not what it might be, how much it will cost, or when it will be decided.

Expect Congress to weigh in—they may not have the appetite to maintain the funding levels given the service has spent over $4.2B since 2015 and shifted NGAD narratives a couple of times…only to arrive at this inflection point—which sounds like another narrative shift is on the horizon.

Meanwhile, assume international 6^th-gen fighter programs like FCAS and GCAP will be tracking the US Air Force’s next move closely.

This sounds like the makings of a podcast episode….

In That Number

7,000

More than 7,000 NSA analysts are now using generative AI tools.

TRIVIA

On this day in 1964, a series of mistakes led to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which resulted in retaliatory airstrikes and a resolution for direct escalation of the Vietnam War. Which of these mistakes did NOT contribute to the incident?

A) misinterpreted communication intercepts
B) aircraft bombed the wrong targets
C) erroneous radar returns of approaching torpedo boats
D) overeager sonarmen falsely reported attacking torpedo boats

On the Radar

The US, Japan, and South Korea signed a trilateral security agreement amid deteriorating regional security (read: Russia and China). Amid the news, two other noteworthy items made headlines. Japan will co-produce two key missiles: Raytheon’s AIM-120 AMRAAM and Lockheed’s Patriot PAC-3 interceptor. The Pentagon also announced intentions to convert US Forces Japan (USFJ) from an administrative command to an operational command of forces assigned.

• The Merge’s Take: Co-production is the way and now made possible due to Japan scrapping its arms export ban, which has been in place since the end of WWII. Expect more US-Japanese defense industrial partnerships to bloom. As for USFJ, it sounds like it will attempt to mirror US Forces Korea (USFK), which does have OPCON (operational control) of its forces assigned. Maybe this opens the door for a Northeast Asia Command?

The Air Force’s B-52 modernization hit the realities of most upgrade programs—cost overruns. The engine upgrade cost grew $2.5B to $15B while the radar jumped $1B to $3.3B. Those are all ‘Bs’ as in Billions. The radar is supposed to achieve initial operational capability (IOC) in 2027, but the IOC engine timeline slipped 3 years to 2033.

• The Merge’s Take: The B-52J program is a big deal—and another program requiring dump trucks of money from the Air Force. The $48.6B modernization will keep the 76 bombers flying until 2060—when they will be 100 years old. That’s not a typo; the ‘newest’ B-52 flying today was built in 1962. Like trying to upgrade an old house, expect this program to run into more issues as the upgrade program progresses. Side note: the upgrade plan originally had a 2-stage designation—B-52I for the radar upgrade and B-52J for the engine (and cockpit) upgrade. That was dropped because the delivery timelines were so close. Well, not anymore. Maybe the “B-52I” will get revived?

The Army’s bizjet-based ISR program is making strides, with sensor integration contracts by end-of-year and being operational in 2026-ish. Known as HADES (High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System), the program uses Bombardier Global 6500 jets modified to carry Moving Target Indication (MTI) and signals intelligence (SIGINT) payloads for ‘deep-sensing’ in support of ground forces.

• The Merge’s Take: A jet doing ISR sounds a lot like an Air Force mission—a detail not lost on some airpower pundits. We say let ‘em cook. HADES is intended to replace the Army’s RC-12X Guardrail and MC-12 EMARSS fixed-wing prop fleets with a platform that can fly higher, faster, longer, and sense further. The Army has been working on this for almost 5 years, informed by the ARTEMIS (2020) and ARES (2022) tech demonstrator projects that used a mix of government and contract-owned equipment to deploy, operate, and validate the technical approach. The process is unconventional and—so far—a stand-out success. In that time, what has the Air Force done to advance this ISR-for-soldier mission?

They Said It
“You can think of the mission autonomy as the brain of your autonomous vehicle. It is important that many protections are put around that, which drove the different classification posture.”

— Col. Tim Helfrich, Senior Materiel Leader for the Air Force’s Advanced Aircraft Division, on the sensitivities of disclosing the 5 vendors on contract developing the autonomy for the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program

Knowledge Bombs

• Ukraine received long-awaited F-16s in country, with 20 projected to be delivered by end-of-year

• General Atomics was awarded a $98m contract do develop and deploy air-to-air autonomy on MQ-20 Avenger to serve as an unmanned red-air surrogate

• The Pentagon’s Inspector General is evaluating the selection criteria for the Replicator initiative

• Boeing named its new CEO, who has a defense industry background

• India is getting Russian S-400 air defense interceptors

• The Army wants its new medium-range air-defense system to have AIM-120D-like capability in an AIM-9X package (program starts next year)

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ANSWER
B. The aircraft didn’t bomb anything because no boats were involved in the incident. The August 4^th misinterpreted communications were later deduced to be the North Vietnamese coordinating a recovery effort for the boats damaged on August 2^nd. Weather phenomena led to the radar returns (which were blindly fired on), and the situation led to a biased interpretation of sonar hits. Clarifying details of the event weren’t declassified until 2006.