When it comes to hulls displacing water and aircraft making shadows on the ramp, the Age of Transformation begat the last few a slew of exquisite platforms that everyone is familiar with.
While previous generations created a series of evolutionary classes of ships and aircraft, the Age of Transformation stalled and foundered. The resulting Tiffany too-bit-to-fail programs – if they ever made it in to production – proved to be not quite the generation jump in not quite the needed numbers and capability promised or needed.
The question was always in the background – are we a learning institution? Who will be the first service to break the habit?
As reported by Valerie Insinna over at DefenseNews – it looks like it just might be the Air Force;
The U.S. Air Force is preparing to radically alter the acquisition strategy for its next generation of fighter jets, with a new plan that could require industry to design, develop and produce a new fighter in five years or less.
On Oct. 1, the service will officially reshape its next-generation fighter program, known as Next Generation Air Dominance, or NGAD, Will Roper, the Air Force’s acquisition executive, said during an exclusive interview with Defense News.
Under a new office headed by a yet-unnamed program manager, the NGAD program will adopt a rapid approach to developing small batches of fighters with multiple companies, much like the Century Series of aircraft built in the 1950s, Roper said.
Five years. That will drive a lot of things – all of which look good.
But the point, Roper said, is that instead of trying to hone requirements to meet an unknown threat 25 years into the future, the Air Force would rapidly churn out aircraft with new technologies — a tactic that could impose uncertainty on near-peer competitors like Russia and China and force them to deal with the U.S. military on its own terms.
Imagine “every four or five years there was the F-200, F-201, F-202 and it was vague and mysterious [on what the planes] have, but it’s clear it’s a real program and there are real airplanes flying. Well now you have to figure out: What are we bringing to the fight? What improved? How certain are you that you’ve got the best airplane to win?” Roper wondered.
It seems obvious, but it is a forgotten successful path previous generations followed that may not have been “efficient” in a narrowly scoped definition of the word – but it sure was effective.
“[A Century Series approach] strikes me that it truly is traditional in a way because this is how it was done in the past. And I think that’s what they’re trying to get to. They want fresh designs. But the difficulty is always as you start to make the most important trade-offs and identify the most important criteria,” she said. “Those become pretty serious driving functions pretty quickly.”
“Second Century Fighters?” Why not?
We’ll have to see what Congress has to think about the concept.
So, how is F/A-XX going?