Aviation Trends: Air Force Putting Software First for Next-Gen Air Dominance.

• Author: Roaten, Meredith
• Position: AIR POWER

The Air Force already determined that the replacement for the F-22 Raptor will not be a single plane, but a portfolio of next-generation capabilities to face warfare in a contested environment.

Now, Pentagon leaders say to reach air dominance by the end of the decade, the service needs to shift focus from the hardware to developing software.

The Next-Generation Air Dominance program--known as NGAD--centers around building a new sixth-generation fighter aircraft with an unknown number of manned and unmanned systems among its ranks.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall recently announced the fighter--which would be similar to the F-22 or F-15EX Super Hornet--has moved into the development phase.

But the manned fighter may not be the linchpin for air dominance, according to a new report published by the Hudson Institute. Without uncrewed systems and sensors for situational awareness, a manned fighter "would be unlikely to deliver more than an incrementally improved version of today's fighters," the report posited.

"As counter-air sensors and missiles are easier and less expensive to advance than manned aircraft, whatever edge manned NGAD aircraft might provide would be fleeting and evolving them to stay ahead of adversaries would likely be unaffordable and late-to-need," according to the report.

The strength of the NGAD will come from combining the power and flexibility of the manned and unmanned systems and their associated sensors in what's called "teaming."

"It is the idea like a sports team, where each individual member of the team is born and grows up and is developed independently of other members of the team," Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and co-author of the report, said during a panel discussion. "They come together in a particular formation to conduct a set of plays. They may then come apart and either form different formations down the road or even join different teams."

That partnership and cohesion boils down to building and integrating better software, said Kendall. The autonomous capability needed for uncrewed aircraft is enabled by artificial intelligence.

It's a capability race that the Air Force doesn't want to lose, Kendall said.

"I'm not going to say anything that you don't know is true about software. It's hard. But nevertheless, I think we can get to a meaningful level of initial capability," he said during a recent Air Force Association event.

Earlier this year, Kendall announced seven "operational...