The U.S. Air Force’s force design director says analyses to date show the service will face more operational risk and be less able to achieve assigned objectives without a new crewed sixth-generation combat jet. Air Force wargaming has revealed a need to keep persistent pressure on the enemy in forward areas and that a force structure centered solely on long-range, stand-off capabilities does not win major fights. The service has yet to make a final decision on how to proceed, or not, with work on a new crewed sixth-generation combat jet as part of its Next Generation Air Domaince (NGAD) initiative, which will have broader ramifications for the entire force.
Air Force Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel discussed the NGAD combat jet and related matters during a talk at the Hudson Institute think tank in Washington, D.C., hosted earlier today. Kunkel is currently the director of Force Design, Integration, and Wargaming within the office of the deputy chief of staff for Air Force Futures at the service’s top headquarters at the Pentagon.
“So, the fight looks fundamentally different with [the] NGAD [combat jet] and without NGAD,” Kunkel said. “I won’t go into the details on how the fight looks different, but the fight looks much better when NGAD’s in it.”
“So, I think at the end of the day, what we’ll find is, you know, we’ll make a decision on how the Joint Force wants to fight. If the Joint Force wants to fight with an NGAD, and [to gain] air superiority in these really, really tough places to achieve it, then we’ll pursue NGAD and it’ll be, frankly, it’ll be less operational risk. The NGAD provides dominant capabilities,” he continued. “If we choose not to, as a nation, to pursue NGAD, then that fight’s just going to look a little bit different, all right, and we may not be able to pursue or achieve all of our policy objectives.”
Details about competing NGAD combat jet designs that have been under development for years now are limited. The core requirements are understood to call for a relatively large, high-performance, and long-range design with a very high level of broadband low-observability (stealthiness) and an array of advanced sensors, networking, and other capabilities. The jets have also been expected to have a high unit price of around $300 million or more. Former Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said in January that it would take approximately $20 billion, at least, just to complete the development of the aircraft. Series production of the aircraft would result in the complete cost of the program being much larger.
Kendall had initiated a deep review of the NGAD combat jet plans last year. The Air Force considered several alternatives as part of that process, including a lower-cost design with more truncated capabilities and more focused on just acting as an aerial controller for Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) drones. The reassessment of NGAD also tied in with larger future force structure discussions, including about a possible shift in focus to longer-range, stand-off capabilities, such as those that the forthcoming B-21 Raider stealth bomber will provide.
“There were some folks that were like, what if we just become an all-long-range force? And so we’re like, okay, let’s try it, let’s see what [an] all-long-range force looks like,” Kunkel said at the Hudson Institute today. “And turns out, an all-long-range force loses because what it can’t do is, it can’t apply constant pressure to the adversary.”
“You’ve got to be forward in order to sustain the tempo that’s required to bring the adversary to a sneeze. So an all-long-range force, … it sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? You sit in Topeka, Kansas, you press a red button, the war gets fought. Nobody gets hurt. It’s all done at long range,” Kunkel continued. “[But] it doesn’t win because it just can’t sustain the tempo of the fight.”
“Long-range fires are extremely important. They’re absolutely game-changing. They’re going to help us out,” he added. “But they’re probably not going to do it at the tempo that’s required to keep the adversary, you know, on its knees all the time. You need something else. You need something inside. You need something inside that can generate tempo and mass.”
Kunkel acknowledged that this need to be able to persist closer to the epicenter for a future fight raises its own challenges and questions, especially amid ever-growing air and surface-launched missile threats. The Air Force published a report detailing a vision for the service by 2050 last year, which underlined these issues, particularly in highlighting the expectation that anti-air missiles with a range of 1,000 miles will be part of that future threat ecosystem. For years now, the Air Force has already become increasingly concerned about the survivability of key supporting assets, especially aerial refueling tankers, even in what have been traditionally considered safer rear areas.
“We are more focused on survivable air refueling,” Kunkel said. “We’re approaching this from the kill chain perspective.”
He further elaborated that what this means is the Air Force is looking at multiple tiers of what he referred to as “attack surfaces” in the aerial refueling space that a potential adversary would have to address, which, in turn, would complicate their kill chain planning cycles. The service has been looking to acquire new stealthy tankers as part of a larger Next-Generation Aerial Refueling System (NGAS) initiative, but has also been exploring other options like podded aerial refueling capabilities for fighter-sized aircraft.
“There are many attack surfaces that we can attack to bring survivable air refueling, right?” Kunkel noted. “NGAS might be part of the solution, but there are other places along this kill chain that we can attack the adversary, and that’s the approach we’re taking.”
The Air Force is also looking at future air operations, especially in the context of a potential high-end fight in the Pacific against China, with the expectation of being under constant attack, or at least the threat thereof. This creates additional demands for forces trying to conduct higher-tempo operations in forward areas.
“The Air Force of the future is not going to be one that’s operating from sanctuary, right? We are going to be contested everywhere, and frankly, we’re contested everywhere right now,” Kunkel said. “So this thought that we have to operate under the threat of attack is something that’s going to be with us forever.”
Kunkel emphasized the Air Force’s current focus in this regard on more distributed and disaggregated concepts of operations, presently referred to collectively as Agile Combat Operations (ACE), that are designed to make friendly forces harder to target. Expanding the total number of operating locations available to Air Force units is a key element of ACE, as underscored by the massive effort in the past year or so to refurbish historic North Field on the U.S. island of Tinian in the western Pacific, which you can read more about here.
New and improved supporting capabilities, all the way down to the most basic levels, as well as survivable supply chains, will also be needed to ensure that Air Force aircraft can operate effectively even from more far-flung locales, according to Kunkel. The requirements for sustaining historically maintenance-intentive stealthy aircraft, including skins and coatings that are highly sensitive to environmental factors, is a particular issue that needs to be addressed.
“When you think about the sustainment architectures that we built in the past, the thought was that they were going to be in sanctuary. So, you know, you could afford to build a piece of aircraft ground equipment that weighed 10,000 pounds and wouldn’t fit on a C-130,” Kunkel explained. “You can afford to have low-observable [steathly] restoration timelines on your aircraft that lasted multiple days and required climate-controlled facilities.”
“In a new environment where that whole thing is going to be under threat, we’ve got to think about it differently,” he continued. “So we have been leveraging new technologies … in the field of low-observable maintenance, we made a significant amount of progress.”
“And I will tell you, some of it’s not like the sexy, cool stuff. It’s like the basics. It’s like bomb loaders, missile loaders, and, you know, refueling trucks and, you know, electric carts and air conditioning carts. They’ve got to be made differently,” he added.
Kunkel did appear to push back on calls for more physical hardening of facilities against enemy attacks, something that has become a heated topic of debate. The Hudson Institute think tank itself just published a report in January warning that U.S. airbases in the Pacific have been left worryingly vulnerable by a lack of investment in hardened and unhardened aircraft shelters.
“There’s this thought that we need to invest in more defense. … And my counter [to] that is no, we actually need to invest in more offense,” Kunkel said without explicitly mentioning physical hardening. “We need to invest in more offense, and we need to make sure that those offensive capabilities inherently have survivability built into them.”
As other Air Force officials have done in the past, Kunkel did advocate for more active air and missile defenses. A huge new air defense architecture taking shape on the critically strategic U.S. island of Guam in the western Pacific is a prime example of work already being done toward this end.
Kunkel is also the latest Air Force official to raise the possibility of the service taking a more direct role in the air and missile defense realm. Since 1948, the U.S. Army has been the lead service in charge of defending Air Force bases at home and abroad against air and missile threats.
There is the additional question now about whether budget priorities under President Donald Trump’s new administration might upend various Air Force modernization plans, as well as ones across the rest of the U.S. military. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has directed a review of proposed Fiscal Year 2026 spending plans with an eye toward shifting roughly eight percent, or some $50 billion, of the Department of Defense’s entire budget to new priorities, including a hugely expanded homeland missile defense architecture now dubbed Golden Dome.
Air Force officials have already raised concerns about the affordability of the NGAD combat jet, as well as stealthy tankers and CCA drones, given the demands of even higher-priority programs. The ballooning costs of the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) effort have been a key factor. There is also talk about increasing the size of the future B-21 bomber fleet. Hegseth has also ordered the Air Force to put a broad swath of modernization work on pause until a new Air Force secretary is confirmed and can review the plans.
Speaking today, Kunkel was bullish on the Air Force’s future budget prospects, but acknowledged that cuts to existing programs could have significant impacts.
“The role of the Air Force is increasing. It’s not decreasing. It’s increasing,” he said. “For this future fight, we’re going to be a big part of that. So no easy solutions in that space.”
“Our investments and our force design is [sic] completely in line with where the administration is going,” he added. “When you look at the Secretary’s priorities, and you look at our force design, there’s a match.”
Though questions remain about exactly what shape it will take, the Air Force is clearly still pushing for the NGAD combat jet to be part of that future force structure.
Contact the author: joe@twz.com