Is the U.S. Air Force set to repeat history, or remake it? The rollout of the F-47, the first manned sixth-generation fighter and cornerstone of the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program, has revived a controversy that resonates with the problematic past of the F-22 Raptor: can quality stand in for quantity in an age of great power competition?
The F-47, or “stealth++” for its improved low-observable capabilities, has a 1,000-nautical-mile combat radius and a host of technical upgrades on earlier versions. “the F-47 will have significantly longer range, more advanced stealth, be more sustainable, supportable, and have higher availability than our fifth-generation fighters. This platform is designed with a ‘built to adapt’ mindset and will take significantly less manpower and infrastructure to deploy.” Nevertheless, the move to purchase just 185 of these jets a number eerily reminiscent of the F-22’s final production run has raised alarms among defense analysts and operational planners alike.
The F-22’s own history is a cautionary example. Its premature line shutdown resulted in total program costs were spread over just 190 airframes, placing a premium on per-unit cost and placing a cap on the fleet’s operational flexibility. The F-47, with its touted promises of reduced maintenance and more durable, “baked-in” stealth paint jobs an improvement over the F-22’s man-intensive surfaces is subject to the same math. As one Pentagon official explained, “We did make a strategic decision to go ‘all-in’ on F-47.” Critics contend, however, that a boutique fleet, however modern, is a gamble in a high-attrition war with a peer competitor such as China.
It is here that the Air Force’s embrace of uncrewed Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) comes into clear focus. The strategy today relies on the coupling of every F-47 with more than five autonomous “loyal wingman” unmanned aerial vehicles to reach a baseline of 1,000 CCAs in the initial force. These UAVs are not decoys. As Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall put it, “The expectation is that these (unmanned) aircraft can be designed to be less survivable and less capable, but still bring an awful lot to the fight in a mixture that the enemy has a very hard time sorting out and dealing with. You can even intentionally sacrifice some of them to draw fire, if you will, to make the enemy expose himself.” You can even purposely sacrifice a few of them to attract fire, so to speak, in order to expose the enemy There will be unmanned loyal wingman aircraft flying in tandem with crewed sixth-generation fighters in a “wingman” drone role.
The technical advance is dramatic. CCAs are being constructed with machine learning and AI central, which will allow them to scout ahead, intercept enemy signals, fire missiles, and even serve as communications nodes. The Air Force Research Laboratory’s Skyborg program and DARPA’s X-61A Gremlins have already proven the feasibility of AI-assisted drone teaming, while industry partners such as Anduril, General Atomics, and Boeing are working feverishly to get operational prototypes like the YFQ-42A and YFQ-44A into the field Ground testing is officially underway for our Collaborative Combat Aircraft program.
However, the transition to a manned-unmanned force structure comes with its own set of challenges. Operating swarms of autonomous CCAs needs novel command and control, sensor fusion, and mission planning paradigms. The Air Force foresees a day when a single pilot can conduct a flight formation of drones by calling out “plays” instead of commanding each maneuver individually. As Secretary Kendall observed, The idea is the manned aircraft is essentially calling plays, and he’s using these other unmanned combat aircraft basically as a formation, to do things that make sense tactically. This opens up a whole bunch of opportunities the manned aircraft is really calling plays.
Attrition is a design aspect, not an failure mechanism. CCAs are designed to be “attritable” cheap enough to be expendable in combat at no strategic cost, but good enough to decide the outcome in a long war. This design draws on lessons from the recent wars, in which industrial power and capacity for replacement losses have been determinants. As one commentator noted, two hundred F-47s with no reserve fleet, no hot production line, and no clear replenishment pathway is not a warfighting strategy. It is a gamble Attritional warfare is something that breaks. Aircraft get shot down. Drones get lost. Ammo is depleted.
The F-47’s stealth features are also impressive. Contrary to the F-22’s infamous maintenance nightmare photographs of peeling stealth coatings became a shorthand for operations woes the F-47 uses robust, integrated radar-absorbing materials that offer reduced lifecycle costs and greater availability. This is an important improvement, since operational tempo and availability could be as important as sheer capability in an extended campaign.
Nevertheless, the unanswered question is: will the F-47’s qualitative advantage, boosted by a phalanx of unfettered wingmen, be sufficient to balance the danger of a numerically limited manned air fleet? With competitors deploying fifth-generation systems of their own China’s J-36, for instance, is optimized for long range and drone integration the U.S. will be engaged in a competition not only of technology, but of industrial and doctrinal resilience China’s J-36: Shaping Strategic Airspace Denial.
The years ahead will prove if the Air Force’s “quality-plus-quantity” hybrid can provide the combat mass and resilience needed for the next generation of air warfare. Until then, the F-47 remains a testament to engineering and a poignant reminder that in war, numbers and the fact that it is possible to lose and replace them still count.
