The Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program, just punted by the Biden administration to his successor, is one of many big-ticket defense initiatives that will be closely scrutinized by President-elect Donald Trump’s national security team, his former acting defense secretary told The War Zone in an exclusive interview Thursday afternoon. These are decisions that will affect hundreds of billions of dollars in defense spending and tens of thousands of jobs. You can read more about yesterday’s NGAD decision here.
NGAD, described by the Air Force as a “family of systems,” includes its crewed sixth-generation stealth combat jet. The Air Force was already conducting a deep review of its NGAD plans, due to be completed before the end of the year.
“I feel it is highly likely that the incoming team will take a very careful look at all major acquisition programs and try to bring coherence to them, and more importantly, determine if these are the necessary capabilities to fight in the future operating environments that, frankly, these legacy systems are not optimized for,” said Chris Miller, who served under Trump from Nov. 9, 2020, until Jan. 20, 2021. He spoke to us as a former cabinet member, not a representative of Trump’s new administration.
“The defense primes have such outsized influence,” he said when asked about the future of NGAD and other programs. “[Frank Kendall] the Chief of Staff of the Air Force recognized NGAD needs to be relooked or rescoped.”
Miller acknowledged that he doesn’t have “in-depth knowledge to pass judgement” about NGAD, “but I can say with a degree of confidence that the NGAD program and others … will get looked at and probably a determination will be … made about how this fits into the new era of warfighting. As we return from quantity to quality, how we use military force to deter our enemies – and if not, how to fight and win – is the overarching concept.”
Miller, who dealt with the nuclear trident and hypersonic weapons procurement during his short time at the Pentagon, singled out several programs he surmises will likely be closely examined. Many are among the U.S. government’s biggest expenditures.
- The B-21 Raider long-range stealth bomber.
- Army systems like the Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) tiltrotor replacement for the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter; Long Endurance ISR; the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle and the overall quantity of heavy armor.
In addition to specific weapon procurements, Trump’s team will likely also scrutinize the Pentagon’s $1 billion Replicator program, Miller said. It was designed by the Biden administration to overcome “the PRC’s biggest advantage, which is mass: more ships, more missiles, more people,” Asst. Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said when it was first unveiled in August 2023.
In May, AeroVironment’s Switchblade 600 loitering munition was the first weapon the Pentagon announced by name that it would buy for Replicator. The follow-on Replicator 1.2 tranche announced last month includes – among other items – low-cost air vehicles that could evolve into relatively cheap cruise missiles.
The Enterprise Test Vehicle (ETV) program, which the Air Force is running in cooperation with the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), was among a second tranche of “capabilities” to get a boost through the Replicator initiative. At present, four companies – Anduril Industries, Integrated Solutions for Systems, Inc., Leidos subsidiary Dynetics, and Zone 5 Technologies – are currently building prototypes for ETV with the expectation that all of them will be flight-tested.
“Select ETV prototypes will be accelerated to scaled production,” according to the Pentagon’s Replicator 1.2 press release.
The next tranche of that effort, dubbed Replicator 2, will focus on counter-drone capabilities but funding for that won’t be proposed to Congress until the Fiscal Year 2026 Presidential Budget request, according to a September memo from the Pentagon.
There was “a lot of disenchantment in the defense technology, and small business community that were held out of being part of Replicator,” explained Miller, now serving as chief strategy officer for DYZNE Technologies, which develops defense-facing AI-enabled air, land, and sea systems. “The vast majority went to a handful of nontraditional defense companies.”
“Being a member of the nontraditional defense industry, I can say definitively that a whole bunch of the smaller and midsize up-and-coming defense tech companies were really, really frustrated and frankly disgusted at the way Replicator played out,” Miller said. “I don’t know if Replicator will continue as Replicator, it’s a heavy lift, tied to legacy people. It seems much more like a public relations stunt than an actual meaningful method to deliver capability to fielded forces.”
Earlier Thursday, we asked the Pentagon’s top spokesman about the future of programs like NGAD, Sentinel and Replicator.
“I’m not going to speculate on what future administrations may do, but I can be very confident in saying that we’ll do everything we need to do to defend this country,” Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder responded to our question during his afternoon press briefing.
Miller said the wrong approach has been taken to how the U.S. buys its weapons.
Currently, “we have it flipped on its head,” Miller stated about the procurement of big-ticket defense items. “We are developing capabilities and then forcing them into the warfighting concept. We need to get back to the tried and true method, make sure of what our warfighting theory of victory is, and then use that to develop capabilities, instead of individual services creating incredibly complex weapon systems that no longer fit into what we are trying to do.”
The new administration, he added, is “going to go deep into the numbers and have a hard look at whether the American taxpayer gets value out of these systems. We are operating off a very decrepit and poorly produced joint warfighter concept.”
There’s a lot riding on the mercurial Trump’s approach to these systems and we’ll have more answers after he takes office on Jan. 20. While he doesn’t have any inside information, Miller has more insight than most about what Trump might do.
“Anyone who says they speak for Donald Trump is either lying or stupid,” Miller exclaimed. “I’m speaking as a national security professional who worked closely with him in the past.”
Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com