Pentagon inspector general has questions about the Air Force’s sixth-gen fighter
The Pentagon's inspector general wants to look into whether the Next Generation Air Dominance program was mature enough to enter the engineering and manufacturing development phase. However, the program may have never officially entered EMD.
By VALERIE INSINNA
on September 27, 2022 at 5:35 PM
WASHINGTON —The Air Force’s sixth generation fighter program hasn’t produced a single operational aircraft yet, but the Defense Department inspector general is already looking into whether the service is moving too fast with untested tech.
“Our objective is to determine the extent to which the Air Force demonstrated that the critical technologies used in the Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) fighter aircraft were mature enough to support entry into the engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) phase of the NGAD program’s acquisition timeline,” Randolph Stone, assistant inspector general for evaluations, space, intelligence, engineering and oversight, wrote in a memo Monday announcing a new review.
The Air Force did not have an immediate comment on the matter.
The premise of the evaluation sounds simple enough, but there’s a problem: The NGAD program may not technically be in the engineering and manufacturing development stage just yet, based on the latest of several clarifying comments from Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall.
https://breakingdefense.com/2022/09/pentagon-inspector-general-has-questions-about-the-air-forces-sixth-gen-fighter/
