A sixth-generation carrier fighter stuck on the PowerPoint presentation becomes a problem of the industrial base as much as the aviation community. The F/A-XX program at the Navy has been working on the requirements for the carrier air wing of the future for years, and the center of gravity of the program, after all these years, has shifted from the engineering to the decision point, and there is a cost to that, and it does not appear neatly in the budget line.
The Navy has already invested heavily in the research and development of F/A-XX, calling it “the successor to the Super Hornet force structure and a critical component of the modernized air wing.” It is meant to combine stealth and sensor capability with standoff capability and serve as a coordination point for manned and unmanned aircraft. These are not ‘nice-to-have’ features, but rather the operational hypothesis for how carrier air can be made effective in the presence of increasingly capable air defenses and long-range threats.
This stall takes on significance because the environment in which the U.S. programmatics must compete no longer waits for the results to be known. The U.S. military evaluations that are highlighted in the December 2025 China Military Power Report indicate that initial flight tests of two different sixth-generation Chinese fighter designs will commence as early as December 2024. The J-36 and J-50 designation may be more significant in terms of what it represents rather than the designation itself development on two different tracks, one that supports long-range land-based missions and the other that takes into account carrier operating requirements.
F/A-XX represented a vision based on the same “system-of-systems” concept a platform that sees farther, communicates faster, and commands unmanned collaborators. But without a downselect and commitment to engineering and manufacturing development, it is difficult to discern how these vision statements can or should be realized through hardware, test rates, and production decisions.
But then there’s a rather mundane one: industrial muscle memory. Fighter procurements are based on having qualified suppliers, long-lead manufacturing expertise, and engineers with collective knowledge about a particular platform. If a competition stretches out with no clear winner in sight, primes have little reason to start pouring in significant effort, and this can be done by the subcontractors. This isn’t a hypothetical scenario; this is what happens when one wants to keep top-notch design talent in a holding pattern.
However, Congress has indicated a growing lack of patience for the status quo. The FY26 appropriations bill includes RDT funds for F/A-XX totaling $972 million, of which a plus-up of $897 million, along with language intended to prod the program towards a single contract award for the EMD phase. Additionally, Congress has been critical of past spending being used for extensions that have not, in fact, move the program ahead, and have called for a new plan that outlines the budgetary, policy, or programmatic barriers that have prevented the program from reaching the Milestone B gate.
This funding effort alone will not address the design challenge but points to the essential truth of the engineering process: aircraft will not grow on tree branches. A sixth-generation fighter for the carriers will require constant testing infrastructure and prototyping that will not be able to be paused and restarted without repercussions.
The longer the F/A-XX is between requirement and award, the more likely it is that the Navy could find itself losing not only a capability, but also the people, suppliers, and know-how for how to integrate it that make it possible at all to field it on a timely fielding possible at all.
