This article follows on from the article " The US Air Force's future NGAD fighter program will be the antithesis of the F35 (1/2) » published on May 18, 2021.
During his audience before the American Congress on the sidelines of the preparation of the 2022 annual Defense budget, the Chief of Staff of the US Air Force, General Brown, presented the future format of American hunting for 2030. This is based on “4 aircraft +1”, namely the F15EX Eagle II, the F16 Viper, the F35A Lighting II and the A10 Thunderbolt 2. The F22, pillar of American air superiority for 15 years, no longer appears in this list, and is replaced by the first aircraft in the Next Generation Air Dominance, or NGAD, program. Resulting from a real conceptual revolution in the way of designing a combat aircraft, the NGAD program aims to develop and put into service a new aircraft to replace the Raptor deemed unsuitable for the Pacific theater and too complex and expensive to maintain, and this in less than 10 years, but also to develop a second aircraft, 7 to 8 years later, in a dynamic breaking with the doctrines of the single-aircraft program and absolute and evolving versatility which have shaped all military aeronautical programs Westerners for 50 years.
Beyond these two already very "innovative" aspects for the design and management of an aeronautical defense program, 3 other complementary dimensions have been defined in order to allow the US Air Force to have the aircraft it needs. now considers it essential for contain the rise of Chinese power in the Pacific, and neutralize the threat that this power poses to the allies of the United States, in particular Taiwan.
3- Technological bricks and platforms
To design such a major new program in such a short time frame and with such strong budgetary constraints, since most of the credits devoted to the modernization of the tactical fighter fleet are captured by the F35A program, the US Air Force has deeply changed its industrial paradigms. The most important of these is the separation between the development of the technological bricks equipping a device, and the development of the platforms which are equipped with them. The F35 program has in fact shown the limits and extreme excesses of the joint development of advanced technologies and a platform to integrate them, this creating significant risks in terms of deadlines, cost control, but above all reliability. . Thus, although more than 600 F35s have already entered service with around ten air forces around the world, the device has still not reached sufficient operational maturity to be declared fully combat-ready. Worse, the devices delivered are in a degraded version that does not have all the planned capabilities, and will have to be updated, at a cost of millions of dollars and glaring unavailability, in the months and years to come. .
The US Air Force can no longer afford, today in the face of China or Russia, to fumble technologically as in the case of the F35. This is the reason why the NGAD program is based on a very different approach, the platform being developed only on the basis of existing technological bricks and considered reliable. And when new, more advanced technologies become available, a new platform will be designed and optimized to best integrate them, and at the best price. This approach significantly simplifies the design process, since engineers do not have to anticipate capabilities that may be available within 10 or 20 years, while the technological pace has increased considerably in recent years with the intensification of Sino-American tensions.
In addition, it limits the complexity of technological integration, particularly in the software field, since the number of present and future technological bricks is more limited, and the device more specialized. However, the infobesity of the F35 information system is today one of the greatest handicaps of the device, and attempts to solve a problem often lead to the appearance of new problems, as the system is so complex. and disproportionate. It is interesting to note that this strategy aimed at separating the development of technological bricks within demonstrator programs from the development of combat platforms, was at the heart of a proposal from GIFAS, the association which brings together aeronautical manufacturers. in France, in 2017 on the sidelines of the presidential elections. However, and even if the FCAS program actually integrates the design of a demonstrator, it remains very inspired by the methods used on the programs Rafale, Typhoon and F35, and does not conceptually separate the development of embedded technologies from the development of the single platform of the other.
4- Agility and Hardiness
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