While the U.S. Air Force has not disclosed what its leaders are discussing on the future or lack thereof of the manned Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) fighter, DoD acquisition chief William LaPlante is opening the door to its replacement by unmanned, autonomous drones.
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has estimated the unit cost of the manned NGAD to be several hundred million dollars and the unit cost of accompanying, unmanned Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) to be about one-third that of the Lockheed Martin F-35.
“If you can produce something at a price point [that’s] a third of the F-35 that will work effectively without the man being able to be in it, I’ll be asking for it so it really depends on how this whole concept flows together,” LaPlante told reporters on Aug. 7 at NDIA’s emerging technologies for defense conference in Washington, D.C. “It’s not really a technology issue. It’s more of a CONOPs and expense issue.”
Such a CCA unit cost goal would be about $30 million.
The Air Force has kept most NGAD/CCA work details under wraps as “classified.”
A key question will be whether an unmanned NGAD will be able to execute complex missions. Air Force leaders have said that CCAs may focus on one mission and that the first will be air-to-air.
Kendall has said that preparing the Air Force’s fiscal 2026 program objective memorandum was a heavy lift, due to big ticket items, including the Northrop Grumman B-21 Raider future stealth bomber, NGAD/CCA, and a Nunn-McCurdy breach on the Northrop Grumman LGM-35A Sentinel future ICBM.
“What we keep hearing from inside the Air Force at very high levels is that the threat environment has evolved significantly, particularly in the last year and a half or so,” the Teal Group said last month on manned NGAD in a letter to readers of the group’s World Military & Civil Aircraft Briefing. “So, the airframe they thought they wanted, essentially a big fighter, may not be adequate to today’s task. The NGAD airframe contractors built good responses to the specifications they were given. But the Air Force is deciding if those are really the specifications they’re going to need going forward. They’ve had that Roy Scheider moment when he saw the size of the shark and said you’re going to need a bigger boat.”
Cost, however, may prevent the Air Force from moving forward on a bigger manned NGAD design.
But, as LaPlante suggested, drones may not be the panacea.
“Removing the pilot from an aircraft design and the associated necessary equipment has (in principle) the potential to reduce the costs of an aircraft, but it is no guarantee the aircraft will be cheap,” according to a new Center for Strategic and International Studies study on CCA. “The Global Hawk drone, for example, has a unit cost that can be $130 million or higher, mostly because of the exquisite sensor payloads it carries and the low production volume.”
In addition, advocates of a manned NGAD have pointed to recent drone losses in Ukraine and the Middle East–drones either disabled by electronic warfare or shot down.
In April, the Air Force said that it had chosen privately-held drone makers, General Atomics and Anduril, to build air vehicles in the first round of CCA. The companies beat defense industry heavyweights Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman, though these companies and others are free to bid on future CCA increments.
The Air Force said last week that it recently awarded classified contracts to five vendors–a mix of traditional defense companies and non-marquee ones–for the autonomy piece of CCA.
A version of this story originally appeared in affiliate publication Defense Daily.