US Air Force fighter jet for China v Taiwan may be a command ship for war drones

Whether it’s that or a big 6G manned plane – decide and commit, USAF

The US Air Force realised years ago it had a distance problem. Specifically, its manned fighters – F-15 Eagles, F-16 Falcons, F-22 Raptors and F-35 Lightnings – would struggle to cross the vast western Pacific Ocean to do battle with Chinese jets over, say, Taiwan.
Under the best conditions, a USAF fighter might range 500 or 600 miles with a useful load of weapons. But there’s just one big US air base anywhere near Taiwan: Kadena in Japan’s Okinawa prefecture, 450 miles from Taiwan. Everyone expects Chinese missiles to pummel Kadena in the early hours of a war, possibly putting the base out of action.
Aerial tankers can extend a fighter’s range by hundreds of miles, but the tankers are big, slow and vulnerable. So when the Air Force wrote the requirements for its new Next Generation Air Dominance stealth fighter, longer range was a key requirement. And when the Air Force abruptly paused the NGAD project this summer, it left observers asking whether the world’s leading air arm was giving up on contesting the western Pacific in wartime.
When USAF leaders paused the NGAD program and pledged to reconsider the design parameters for the stealthy manned fighter, they mostly cited the projected high cost of the new jet – up to $300 million per copy. But according to aviation expert Bill Sweetman, there was another factor in their seemingly jarring decision to at least temporarily halt this flagship development effort.
That factor was the meteoric rise of collaborative combat aircraft – smart, stealthy, armed drones – in USAF planning. Where just a few years ago, the Air Force was still planning a long-term fleet dominated by traditional manned fighters, today these robotic, AI-assisted CCAs are quickly taking over.
“CCAs are the disruptive agent in USAF force planning,” Sweetman wrote in a new study for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. 
Just as the Air Force was about to lock the NGAD’s basic specifications, pick a contractor and start spending big on the new plane – potentially tens of billions of dollars just for development – the service realized that smaller, cheaper robotic fighters could do the same job as the big, expensive NGAD. CCAs being tested by disruptive firms such as Anduril and General Atomics “are much of the reason why the manned element of NGAD is being re-scoped,” Sweetman explained.
The Air Force expects to develop different CCAs every few years, constantly folding the latest hardware and software into their designs and buying small batches of just a few hundred of each CCA type before halting production and moving on to the next iteration of the basic concept, never spending more than a few tens of millions of dollars per drone. 
There are hints that a typical early-model CCA – which has the advantage of not needing to support an on-board human pilot – might range as far as 900 miles without aerial refuelling. Nearly doubling the unrefuelled range of its fighters could expand, by a lot, the Air Force’s basing options in a war with China over Taiwan. CCAs could operate from small island airstrips in The Philippines, for example.
The hard pivot toward drone fighters doesn’t mean the Air Force is getting out of the manned fighter business. But whatever manned jet emerges from the re-scoped NGAD effort is likely to be smaller and cheaper than the big, pricey fighter the flying branch anticipated as late as this spring. 
Instead of leading an aerial fight with drones in support, the new NGAD will support the drones as they lead the fight. A pilot in a small, lightly-armed stealth fighter could fly far behind waves of heavily-armed CCAs, helping to command the drones via radio data-link. A “crewed fighter designed to operate with CCAs is not the same as one that fights without them – and might be smaller and cheaper,” according to Sweetman.
If there’s a big risk in the Air Force’s new fighter strategy for Pacific warfare, it’s the risk that the service changes its mind again. The service’s current manned fighters are already inadequate for long-range, over-water battles. It needs farther-flying fighters – and it needs them now. 
If that means buying more and better drones, fine – decide and commit. If it means grudgingly accepting the high cost of a long-range manned fighter, fine – decide and commit. But move fast. The Chinese air force is already prepared for war in the western Pacific. Meanwhile, the US Air Force is still deciding how it wants to fight.