Source: Privy Council No. 10
In recent years, the high price of new weapons in the United States has constantly refreshed the outside world, but recently even the Us media has been stunned by the offer of the next generation of fighters of the US Air Force - up to a record hundreds of millions of dollars!
The Air Force Times said on April 29 that the Air Force's secretly developed "Next Generation Air Superiority Future Fighter (NGAD)" program may be the most expensive fighter project in history, and each manned sixth-generation fighter is expected to cost "hundreds of millions of dollars."
The offer was revealed by U.S. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall at the House Armed Services Committee on the 27th. He did not specify the specific price of the NGAD, but acknowledged that its price was "in the hundreds of millions.". Kendall also stressed, "This number will catch your attention — it will be an expensive plane." ”
Kendall also revealed that the U.S. Air Force hopes to officially deploy NGAD in the early 2030s. The upgraded F-22 Raptor will continue until then.
As the fifth-generation fighters of the Chinese and Russian Air Forces have far exceeded the expectations of the US military, the emergency NGAD has become the most important future fighter on which the US Air Force has high hopes, and its performance and progress are highly confidential. It wasn't until September 2020 that the U.S. Air Force revealed that "a full-scale prototype of the first sixth-generation aircraft has been tested." In May 2021, U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff Brown briefly revealed that the NGAD would begin replacing the F-22 in the 2030s.
The U.S. Air Force is known to have special requirements for the stealth performance and range of NGAD fighters: in the face of potential adversaries such as China and Russia, NGAD must have the ability to infiltrate advanced air defense networks; in order to adapt to the vast Pacific region, NGAD needs an extra-long range. The U.S. Air Force has publicly acknowledged that the F-22, designed for the European theater during the Cold War, has a range that cannot meet the needs of the Pacific Theater. For this reason, the improved F-22 even had to sacrifice stealth performance and attach two huge auxiliary fuel tanks...
The US Air Force Magazine admits that the price of NGAD has far exceeded the imagination of the outside world. Previously known as the most expensive fighter in history, the F-22 was procured at $135 million per unit. The F-35A, another stealth fighter purchased by the U.S. Air Force, costs about $80 million per unit.
Perhaps feeling that the price was too much, Kendall then explained that the NGAD would be "very effective," but it would have to be equipped with cheaper platforms to expand its role in combat — in other words, with the assistance of autonomous unmanned wingmen.
The Air Force did not disclose the cost of such autonomous unmanned wingmanships, but Kendall revealed in his keynote speech in March that he hoped the drones would cost no more than half that of a manned fighter. The Air Force Times said with emotion that if the unit price of NGAD is as high as hundreds of millions of dollars, it means that the cost of unmanned wingmanships in the United States is at least comparable to or higher than the F-35.
According to the vision of the US Air Force, the sixth-generation fighter is an integrated system composed of fighters, drones, communication networks, space perception and other multi-platform systems, and the fighter is the core of it. According to the U.S. think tank Center for Strategic and BudgetAry Assessment, the application of advanced long-range weapons and sensors has greatly reduced the frequency of air combat, so traditional designs that rely on high speed and maneuverability may become less important, and that a sixth-generation fighter should be a larger fighter that relies on enhanced sensors, feature control, networked situational awareness, and very long-range weapons to complete missions before they are discovered or tracked.
In any case, these disruptive designs doomed America's sixth-generation fighter jets to require more innovation and trial and error, as well as higher costs.
To make matters worse, NGAD is divided into two programs, led by the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy. With the two sides competing in demand for future fighters, the Pentagon has made it clear that the two NGAD will not use the same design, which also means that the Air Force's initial desire to reduce unit prices through bulk purchases is no longer feasible.
For the Pentagon, the record price of NGAD proves that the cost of developing new weapons in the United States is still rising rapidly under the kidnapping of the US military-industrial interest complex.
In recent years, the cost of new weapons developed by the United States, whether successful or not, has been staggeringly high, repeatedly breaking world records. For example, the Littoral Combat Ship, which is a light ship, has a construction cost of nearly 10,000 tons of "Arleigh Burke" class destroyers; the planned "Constellation" class frigate is still in development, and the expected cost has exceeded 1 billion US dollars; the KC-46 tanker built by Boeing is about 200 million US dollars per unit, so that the US Air Force cannot replace the aging KC-135 tanker "one-to-one" according to the original plan...
It is not easy to satisfy the appetite of the US military-industrial interest complex.