The U.S. will build a 6th-generation fighter jet. American aerospace titan Boeing will receive a contract to develop and build the centerpiece of the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance program, President Donald Trump announced at the White House on Friday. The NGAD program had been put on hold in the waning months of the Biden administration over questions of cost and suitability for the future fight.
The aircraft is envisioned as the centerpiece of a family of systems, with new drones called Collaborative Combat Aircraft in development to fly alongside the jet. It’s intended as a successor to the F-22 Raptor, but with longer range and more advanced stealth. And according to current plans, it’s expected to be cheaper than the Raptor and produced in greater quantities, Defense One’s Audrey Decker reports.
The aircraft will be called the F-47, which Air Force chief Gen. David Allvin said “honors the legacy of the P-47, whose contributions to air superiority during WWII remain historic.” The numbering also “pays tribute to the founding year of our incredible @usairforce, while also recognizing the 47th @POTUS’s pivotal support for the development of the world’s FIRST sixth-generation fighter,” Allvin wrote on social media Friday evening.
Boeing beat out Lockheed Martin, its only rival for the contract after Northrop Grumman dropped out last year. Lockheed, which designed the U.S. military’s two fifth-gen fighter jets, now has no piece of either the Air Force or Navy 6th-gen efforts.
Rewind: The NGAD development contract was originally supposed to be awarded in 2024, but the service paused the program after soaring cost projections said each jet would cost as much as three F-35s.
The Air Force plans to spend $20 billion over the next five years to develop the program, according to its 2025 budget request, and Boeing is poised to reap production orders worth hundreds of billions more.
Related: “Airbus, Boeing eye fast output as plastics loom for future jets”, Reuters reports off company projections about its next generation of airliners.
Current forecast: “The F-47 will fly during President Trump’s administration,” Allvin predicted.
Trump: The F-47 “is virtually unseeable” and will fly with “many drones, as many as we want,” the president told reporters Friday.
Export version? Trump also floated the possibility of selling “toned-down versions” to allies, saying, “We like to tone them down about 10 percent which probably makes sense, because someday, maybe they’re not our allies.” Read more, here.
That kind of talk has softened the market for U.S. arms in Trump’s first two months in office. “European capitals are reviewing vulnerabilities and want to wean themselves from dependence on American weapons, but expanding homegrown options will take time,” the Washington Post wrote Sunday.
Lockheed is already sweetening its F-35 offer to Canada, trying to keep Ottawa from changing its plans to buy more of the jets, Canada’s Globe and Mail reported Thursday.
ICYMI: Decker recently took a broader look at the F-35 market, here.
Welcome to this Monday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston with Audrey Decker. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1944, 76 prisoners of war began breaking out of Nazi detention at Stalag Luft III, near present-day Żagań, Poland. The event was memorialized in the 1963 film The Great Escape.
Around the Defense Department
The U.S. Navy just sent another guided-missile destroyer to help monitor “southern border operations,” officials from Northern Command announced Saturday.
USS Spruance (DDG 111) and its crew departed port at San Diego this weekend on a “mission to restore territorial integrity at the U.S. southern border…by enhancing maritime efforts and supporting interagency collaboration,” according to NORTHCOM.
That follows the dispatch of a first destroyer from Virginia on a similar mission in the Gulf of Mexico, NORTHCOM announced exactly one week prior. That operation will see the crew of the “reinforc[ing] the nation’s commitment to border security by enhancing maritime efforts and supporting interagency collaboration,” NORTHCOM said on March 15.
Spruance will include an embedded U.S. Coast Guard Law Enforcement Detachment. Those Coasties are trained in “a variety of maritime interdiction missions, including counter-piracy, military combat operations, alien migration interdiction, military force protection, counter terrorism, homeland security, and humanitarian response,” NORTHCOM says. More, here.
Additional reading:
U.S. forces will participate in NATO’s air combat exercise next week, despite reports that the Pentagon plans to cease military exercises in Europe. Ramstein Flag 2025, which will run from March 31 through April 11 and involve 16 nations and over 90 aircraft, will go on “completely as planned,” Air Marshal Johnny Stringer, the deputy commander of NATO’s Allied Air Command, told reporters Monday.
“All relationships, all alliances probably, have their ups and downs,” Stringer said when asked about Trump’s threats to abandon or even annex NATO allies. “But what you’re seeing in Ramstein Flag is some of the highest-end training we’re able to conduct in Europe across a raft of nations, supported by all 32 nations in the Alliance to generate the essential skills that all of us will need to keep Europe safe, and that ability to integrate, to be interoperable across nations, is essential to it, and that is underpinning the exercise.”
Developing: Hegseth’s chief of staff orders an investigation into leaks of “sensitive communications with principals within the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD).” Reuters’ Idrees Ali tweeted the March 21 memo, which calls for the use of polygraph tests.
FYI: Polygraphs are notoriously unreliable, according to the American Psychological Association.
Also: The Department of Justice has launched an investigation into alleged immigration-related leaks to the New York Times, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced Friday.
Trump 2.0
Trump-Russia latest: Kremlin talking-points watch. “On the eve of talks in Saudi Arabia, President Trump’s chief negotiator, Steve Witkoff, echoed some of the Kremlin’s main talking points on the Ukraine war, while advocating for future U.S.-Russian relations based on shared business interests,” the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday after Steve Witkoff spoke to pro-Trump pundit Tucker Carlson.
Witkoff alleged Ukraine is a “false country,” and that the regions of Ukraine Russia has invaded and still occupy “want to be under Russian rule” despite Kremlin-run referendums that the European Union view as illegitimate shams. (BBC: The referendums’ “methodology and results were widely discredited and disputed.”) “The question is will they be—will the world acknowledge that those are Russian territories?” Witkoff said.
“The largest issue in that conflict are these so-called four regions, Donbas, Crimea—you know the names, and there are two others,” Witkoff said to Carlson. (The BBC points out there are actually five regions, or oblasts, in question, and those are Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Crimea.)
“I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy,” Witkoff told Carlson. “He’s super smart,” he said.
Why bring it up: U.S.-Russia talks on Ukraine’s future continue Monday in Saudi Arabia. More at WSJ or the BBC.
Another thing: Trump is still leaning into his imperial dream of annexing Canada, telling reporters Friday, “When I say they should be a state, I mean that. I really mean that,” he said. And in an echo of his recent threatening rhetoric aimed at Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelenskyy, Trump said of Canada’s efforts to resist that “some people don’t have the cards.”
China
Speaking of coercion, “China Is Ready to Blockade Taiwan,” the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday from Taipei after “Beijing’s armed forces have bulked up and practiced isolating the island.”
China-watchers have observed these related developments for years, so what’s new? Hard to say for sure, but the Journal’s graphics team whipped up an interesting series of map layers purporting to illustrate the likely lines of blockade. Read more (gift link) here.
Related reading: China’s military “has made significant headway in building capabilities for all-weather, multi-domain intelligence, surveillance, operational control and a joint air-sea blockade against Taiwan’s lines of communication,” the Taipei Times reported Monday, citing Beijing’s latest Quadrennial Defense Review.
Alleged improvements include “direct amphibious assault operations aimed at seizing strategically important beaches, ports and bases” and “building navy and coast guard offshore patrol vessels en masse.” Read on, here.
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