Trump has announced that Boeing will develop the Air Force’s future fighter jet.
President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced Friday morning that the Air Force will award Boeing the contract to build its “Next Generation Air Dominance Fighter.”
The fighter will be a future replacement for the F-22 Raptor and will be dubbed the “F-47” — and, yes, that’s supposed to be a wink at the fact that Donald Trump is the 47th president of these United States.
The idea is that the new B-21 Raider bomber will form the backbone of our bomber forces over the next several decades, eventually replacing the B-2 Spirit, the B-1 Lancer, and the venerable B-52, while the F-35 Lightning II, which is now in full production, will form the bulk of our multirole fighter/attack fleet.
(The Navy’s sixth-generation fighter contract is still to be decided between Boeing and Northrup Grumman prototypes.)
The F-47 — which will be the most advanced American warplane in the skies — will command a fleet of “collaborative combat aircraft,” a.k.a. autonomous drone wingmen that can extend its range and sensors, and perhaps even take on the extremely dangerous missions into which we might not want to put manned aircraft.
The F-47 is being built, as the program’s name suggests, to establish complete air dominance over the skies of the battlefields of the future.
As I wrote last October, however, the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program has been extremely controversial in recent years as it moved toward a Go/No Go decision. The as-yet-unknown total cost of the program is part of that controversy, of course — the Pentagon hasn’t said just how many F-47s it plans to buy, only that it plans to procure more than the 180 F-22s that were eventually delivered.
But the much larger and, in my view, more significant controversy revolved around the question of whether the United States should be building a sixth-generation manned fighter at all, even one that was designed to be supplemented by unmanned drones, when drones on their own might be the future of air combat.
Now, there are good reasons to want a manned warplane. There are the dystopian ethical considerations of push-button killing on the battlefield. There are the technical challenges and risks associated with counting on drones — in an era of advanced electronic warfare and jamming — to always be useful and available on the battlefield: A manned aircraft, even if it has lost comms with higher command and control, would still be able to fight and get back home. Could a drone?
And there is the tricky fact that, if we bet on drones but our potential adversaries end up fielding advanced manned fighters, we could be putting ourselves at a huge disadvantage.
On the other hand, there are real downsides to moving forward with the NGAD, beginning with cost. In an interview with Defense News this summer, Air Force secretary Frank Kendall said the NGAD is “now expected to cost roughly three times as much as an individual F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.”
The Air Force announced last fall that it would wait for the next president to decide what to do. Now Trump has made that call — and we’re going to move forward with Boeing’s F-47.
To be clear, I’m not criticizing Trump here. I think the arguments on both sides have merit, but, at least from this infantryman’s perspective, while there’s some risk that our adversaries will put all their eggs in the unmanned drone-fighter basket, find an advantage, and steal a march on us, I think the model of keeping American pilots in the air with best tools available is the one that is more likely to succeed. Even if unmanned aircraft eventually do become the future of war, as of right now, manned aircraft are the more proven model.
I had half expected that Trump and Hegseth, under the influence of Elon Musk, would cancel the program. Musk has been vocal about his views of the obsolescence of big, expensive legacy platforms such as the Navy’s aircraft carriers and the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps variants of the F-35. Was Elon convinced otherwise? Or did Trump and Hegseth hear him out and decide to go in another direction?
All I know is that we’ve just seen the president make a call that will be hugely consequential for our nation over the next few decades. We’re going to spend a gigantic amount of money on this weapon system. And the F-47 program is likely to be a critical component of America’s defenses in the 2030s and 2040s, and even beyond. I sure hope we made the right decision.