WHAT KIND OF FIGHTER COULD THE LATEST MILITARY TECH REALLY BUILD?
Alex Hollings | April 21, 2022
If you were put in charge of developing America’s next air superiority fighter—an aircraft purpose-built to dominate the skies over even the most hotly contested warzones of the 21st century—how would you go about doing it? What systems, capabilities and cutting-edge technologies would you build your new fighter around?
That’s a question that was actually posed to America’s premier defense contractors in recent years under secretive developmental programs like the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) and the Navy’s F/A-XX effort.
Unlike the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which has been broadly criticized for trying to meet the needs of too many disparate services in its budget-busting design, these new fighters are being developed under an umbrella of independent cooperation and a very different acquisition process. For starters, both the Air Force and Navy are expected to field different aircraft, though they’ll almost certainly share some subsystems developed in cooperation with one another under the NGAD banner. So whatever platform emerges as America’s next runway-queen air superiority fighter will almost certainly not also be expected to fly carrier duty as well.
Before we go any further, however, we should credit the incredible artwork of Rodrigo Avella, who provided the fantastic feature image for this story, as well as others included throughout. Make sure to check out the rest of his work on his website, and don’t forget to follow him on Twitter and Instagram!
There’s been a great deal of conjecture surrounding the capabilities and technologies we’ll find in America’s next fighters, but while some of this conjecture appears to be substantiated by official statements, most hard details have remained elusive. You can read more about the NGAD program in our previous coverage of it here.
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