It might be worth it to Boeing to get to work adding a boom. Every indication is that the Air Force’s next fighter is going to need a complementary stealthy tanker – perhaps as early as the 2030s.

Air Force leaders pivoted to a cheaper NGAD this summer after realizing their ideal version of the next-generation stealth fighter – one with super-efficient, next generation engines and big fuel tanks – would cost $300 million per jet. That’s three times what today’s Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth fighter costs.  

Now USAF secretary Frank Kendall is demanding a version of the NGAD that costs no more than an F-35. That is, no more than $100 million. That almost certainly means a smaller plane, probably with relatively conventional propulsion. That, in turn, almost certainly means a plane that has the approximately 600-mile combat range that’s currently standard for USAF fighters – rather than the thousand-mile-plus range that might’ve been possible with the pricier NGAD.

Flying just 600 miles there and back without refuelling is problematic in the western Pacific where US and allied air bases might be hundreds or even thousands of miles apart, and where the likeliest combat zones around Taiwan are surrounded by a lot of water … and not much else.

To project its current fighters over those vast distances, the Air Force stages lumbering aerial tankers based on civilian airliners. But these Boeing KC-135s and KC-46s are big, slow and vulnerable to enemy missiles. They might not last long in a full-scale war with China. 

If the Air Force is going to continue building short-range fighters and also continue extending these fighters’ range with mid-air refueling, non-stealthy tankers probably aren’t going to work for much longer. It’s not for no reason that, early last year, the service asked industry to send back ideas for a stealthy tanker that could enter service around 2040 – a few years after NGADs should start reaching front-line squadrons.

A USAF-optimized MQ-25 could enter service earlier – bridging the gap to a bigger stealthy tanker. And once the bigger tankers arrive, the MQ-25s could work alongside them. Imagine a big tanker acting as a kind of flying fuel depot for a number of MQ-25s that sip gas from the bigger tanker and then fan out to distribute that fuel to far-flung fighters operating much closer to the front line.

In US Navy service, there has already been much discussion around using the MQ-25 for more missions than just refuelling, though for now the Navy’s pilots seem determined to confine it to that relatively boring, unglamorous task while keeping combat missions for themselves. Nonetheless in a real shooting war, a desire to avoid losing people might well see MQ-25s used for reconnaissance into dangerous airspace, or even perhaps for strike missions.

The same factors might well come into play in the USAF. With stealthy jet drones deployed by two services rather than just one, the arrival of full-blown unmanned combat aircraft is only getting likelier.