Next Generation Air Dominance Needs A New Flight Path

As the Department of Defense (DoD) proceeds headlong into the “Next Generation Air Dominance” (NGAD) program, it is past time to update the process for procuring frontline fighter aircraft. Great power competition requires much greater procurement efficiency and wider technology participation than the current process enables. The current DoD procurement process includes cost, time, and technology problems that can no longer be accepted if the United States is to compete and win against peer competitors.

With lessons from the F-35 and other past fighter programs, DoD must define and embark on a different course at the inception of the NGAD program—one that will lead to an air-dominance fighter affordable to procure and operate and much better than anything China or Russia can put up against it.¹ Both nations present unique strategic challenges to U.S. national security not faced in recent decades. Their demonstrated ability to rapidly incorporate advanced design and technology into frontline systems—often outpacing U.S. research, development, testing, and acquisition and fielding timelines—could yield operational capabilities that U.S. tactics and training may not be able to overcome if the Pentagon cannot speed up its procurement processes.

The 2018 National Defense Strategy’s focus on great power competition is, on many levels, similar to Cold War–era defense requirements. But unlike the earlier era, the primary competitor this time is on an equal (or better) economic and technical footing, making this competition a true peer-versus-peer (or worse) exam. Greater efficiency is needed across the entire defense system, especially in the acquisition, support, and manufacturing segments. Rather than continue the same processes, now is the time to improve, before the costs, time, and technology disadvantages in the current procurement system are repeated with NGAD.

COST

It would be easy to blame manufacturers for ballooning costs. For example, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported in July that the “F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter program began development in 2001 and remains DoD’s most expensive weapon system program. [It is] more than 8 years delayed and $165 billion over original cost expectations.”² However, major contributing issues include the procurement process, test-and-evaluation process, and lack of operational cost-control mechanisms and incentives. Major defense suppliers mirror DoD systems and structures, often employing former military and government officials in key positions. They have massive staffs to answer government questions at great cost, but to what operational end? For all the good intentions, major programmatic mistakes and redesigns still occur under this overmanaged system.

To compete for a major DoD aircraft program, prime contractors spend hundreds of man-years to chase and shape the multiyear requirements process. For some programs, this can take a decade. After the requirements are set, there is the need to produce demonstration article(s), followed by an expensive proposal process to produce a compliant offer. Those up-front costs to compete on NGAD will exceed $1 billion per offeror, eventually paid by DoD as overhead rates. So, before the Pentagon even down-selects to one prime contractor for NGAD, it will have signed up to a multibillion-dollar price tag under the current process.

Operational and sustainment costs are even worse. Recent information indicates the F-35 operating cost-per-hour (CPH) is up to $40,000—including labor, spare parts, and support equipment costs associated with flying and maintaining the jet.³ In addition, Air Force officials have noted that “even if it could somehow obtain all spare parts . . . for free, F-35 sustainment costs would still exceed affordability targets by 14 percent.”⁴

At that CPH, can the United States afford to prepare for and fight a full-scale war? Fighter pilots know it takes several hundred flight hours per year to be combat ready. It has long been said Rome fell because it could no longer afford to pay the Centurions to man its borders. Without a containment strategy to get the operational costs of future aircraft under control, the United States might not be able to afford to train and deploy its fighter pilots.

Every new fighter is intended to be on the frontline for several decades—which entails upgrade costs for new weapons, sensors, and systems as requirements evolve in the service life of the jet. While the military has made great strides in standardizing software compatibility of components, a flight test and validation program can still cost tens of millions of dollars per upgrade and take months, if not years, to complete and deploy.⁵ This cost and time are unsustainable and noncompetitive against peer adversaries with lower cost and time structure. DoD must, by design and process, change the cost and time factors associated with weapon, sensor, and system additions, modifications, and upgrades.

TIME

The Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) was going to be a new paradigm in aircraft procurement, production, and initial operating capability (IOC) timeline when first conceived. With its timeline now delayed more than eight years past the original plan, the program’s speed and production concept has fallen short of stated goals.⁶ Even the original timeline would have taken longer than 15 years from concept to IOC, which exceeds commercial aircraft development timelines by a factor of 4 to 5. China and Russia are developing weapon systems significantly faster, aided by their ability to steal U.S. intellectual property and designs.⁷  The Pentagon must find ways to close the time gap.

As every warrior learns early on, many battles, if not wars, are won by getting inside the enemy’s decision cycle. Air Force Colonel John Boyd described the decision cycle as an “observe, orient, decide, and act” (OODA) loop. Clearly, when it comes to fighter development, deployment, and upgrades, the United States’ peer competitors are operating inside the Pentagon’s procurement OODA loop. As U.S. future fighter aircraft effectiveness becomes more dependent on computer, data, and automated function updates, time will become an even more precious commodity that cannot be ceded to adversaries.

By design, the U.S. defense procurement system and its associated policies require more time and checks and balances than those in authoritarian countries. Checks and balances are intended to ensure safety and security and prevent graft and corruption. However, in great power competition, DoD can no longer afford the luxury of procurement “perfection”—not only for the next air dominance fighter but for all future military programs. DoD must review and make dramatic revisions to the procurement system to reduce development time and the costs associated with it.

TECHNOLOGY

On this issue, DoD must differentiate between military-specific aircraft technologies, including design, sensors, propulsion, quality control, and sustainability, and commercially available “Silicon Valley” technologies, such as computing, data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

Aircrew who have flown both U.S.- and foreign-manufactured fighters know the advantage of U.S. design, capabilities, and sustainability. Sometimes the U.S. military has been guilty of chasing design characteristics that would be overcome by changing tactics or spectrum responses, and occasionally ignoring proven aviation paradigms, including “faster, farther, higher.” For the most part, however, the U.S. military and industry continue to lead in aircraft design and component technology.

The underlying problem with DoD’s future fighter development is that the pace and effects of technology now exceed the general knowledge base of the defense sector. DoD was for many years the driver for technology innovation, but it long ago stopped defining the leading edge. For example, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was the birthplace for many commercial technologies that are now mainstream, but it no longer drives the advanced technology that can be applied to achieve air dominance. The Pentagon now finds itself with frontline computing, data, connectivity, and automation technologies a generation (or two!) behind state-of-the-art commercially available technology. The problem is exacerbated because the primary potential adversary—China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA)—has demonstrated the understanding and willingness to apply leading technologies to its military equipment. As the head of the Defense Innovation Unit, Michael Brown, said last year, “We’re not moving in government at an agile pace that reflects the nature of the competition. It’s about speed. When we have successful prototypes that we’ve done, it’s difficult for the budgeting process to catch up and the services to catch up.”⁸

Thus, the Pentagon faces the difficult task of asking the right questions and getting the requirements right for NGAD or other programs when its frame of reference is out of date. The problem is compounded when the procurement system and the manufacturers participating in the process are rewarded for using “proven” technologies and processes—which are out of date by commercial standards. DoD is accepting a process that is slower than that of its peer competitors.

BETTER INNOVATION

The communications industry, which has been a key driver of innovation for the past 20 years, faced a similar dilemma several decades ago. Service providers forced a change by insisting their key suppliers decouple computing, software infrastructure, and applications. In other words, they stopped accepting separate “black boxes” for each individual network function. This enabled them to buy the best available technology at each level of the system hierarchy and to evolve each layer at independent rates as innovations became available. The approach has been key to the deployment of the new 5G network infrastructure, while maintaining customer service throughout the upgrade process.

This decoupled approach offered the communications industry an additional advantage: It allowed them to adopt the “software-defined” approach that has been key to scaling and operating leading-edge design centers for years. The basic concept is to abstract the software components from the hardware infrastructure, providing greater agility in system design, deployment, and operational management through flexible software layers. This also provides greater reliability and resilience, as applications can failover to available general-purpose computing systems in microseconds when a problem is incurred, and applications can be updated without bringing systems down—called “hitless” patching and upgrading.

In an advanced airborne system, this would mean navigation and flight control systems, weapons, and sensors may not need unique hardware to perform individual functions. It would also drive better overall utilization of the total computing power available by enabling the aircraft to employ idle computer resources for any specific mission parameter, thus sharing workloads. Such a system architecture would prevent common problems such as a specific sensor task failing because it consumes all available computing power of a single box. Today, overcoming such a failure by adding more box-specific computing power involves a size, weight, and power–cooling (SWaP-C) penalty.

This software-defined approach will also pave the way for faster and more widespread adoption of leading AI techniques, such as machine learning, deep learning, and neural networks. It also provides better defense against the ever-increasing challenge of detecting and defending against cyber intrusion by aiding in early detection of zero-day events, rapidly isolating compromised system nodes without endangering the operation of the aircraft in total. And it enables implementing “on the fly” updates to reply immediately to cyberattacks.

If and when the Department of Defense starts demanding and using software-defined system architectures, it will create more open, replaceable hardware and software functionality, ensuring U.S. military aircraft remain up to date throughout their lifespans, allowing more subsystems to take advantage of economies of scale by using fewer purpose-built, unique components. Such an approach would automate designing and testing before production, and potentially replace large segments of live testing. DoD has already adopted virtual cyber test-to-fail capabilities in various subsectors; this process needs to be expanded to all design, build, test, maintain, and update phases.⁹ Leading commercial technology companies base their entire existence on uptime, resiliency, efficiencies, and data/system security—and they have established processes and procedures that DoD can adopt to reduce time and costs and improve competitiveness.

INFORMATION DOMINANCE

Information dominance must also be a key NGAD objective, because information is an increasingly precious commodity in battle. The U.S. military can no longer take for granted that it will own the information high ground, as it has since World War II. When potential threats can hard- and soft-kill systems on a global scale, future fighters will require agile connectivity, shared and independent information, and decision functionality well beyond the “send it back” limitations and vulnerabilities that are the standards today. As low-earth orbit satellite systems become commonplace for worldwide data and communications, constellations will be able to be replenished on a single launch. Battlefield connectivity will need to progress beyond the traditional line-of-sight (LOS) and beyond-line-of-sight (BLOS) limits and definitions.¹⁰ Today’s adversaries have capable systems to gather, distribute, and disrupt information, meaning NGAD will need to operate in an information environment well beyond current U.S. fighters’ capabilities. It will require high-volume data throughput, seamless LOS/BLOS connectivity, ad hoc battlefront networking, and cyber agility—along with the traditional fighter weapons. To provide these capabilities, the Pentagon will have to adopt technology and system design processes that currently are found only in leading commercial companies.

The procurement system represents an additional barrier to technology advancement. DoD’s prime contractors are focused on the traditional design, build, and support models the procurement and system commands value highly. The result is a combination of suboptimal technology selection and excess costs introduced by the slow process described above.

Finally, there is a talent and focus deficiency in the defense sector. From World War II through the Cold War, engineering positions in the defense sector were viewed as prestigious. Today, top engineering talent—especially system engineers and software developers—flock to the commercial tech sector, not the defense sector, contributing to the lag in the sector.¹¹ In addition, leading-edge commercial technology companies operate on drastically different time horizons than the defense model, and they are viewed and treated as suppliers, not partners or leaders in the definition of requirements for next-gen systems. It is the worst of both worlds: The Defense Department no longer is the technology innovation engine, and it has not embraced the innovation engine of the commercial sector sufficiently. Without immediate process and requirements improvements, the commercial tech industry will continue to be a more attractive sector for talent.

The Pentagon’s leading-edge defense systems can no longer remain disconnected from the latest technology. China, especially, has access to and is incorporating technology faster than the U.S. military. Technology must be applied to address cost and time problems—specifically, embracing automated tools and processes to streamline review, validation, and testing. The NGAD aircraft, and the frontline systems that will support it, require the defense procurement system to ask better questions, set challenging yet technically mature requirements, reduce programmatic time, and achieve cost (procurement and total cost of ownership) outcomes superior to those of U.S. competitors.

The good news is the components needed to achieve next-generation air dominance are all within the capabilities of the United States. The challenge is breaking the mold that got DoD where it is today. NGAD can be cheaper, better, and faster if Congress, the Pentagon, and the defense industry change course now.