/.../If future U.S. national security policy calls for operating over the vast reaches of the Pacific, a future fighter aircraft might be fundamentally different from anything that has come before. “We need to stop thinking about combat aircraft as bombers and fighters or ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] platforms for that matter,” says Mark Gunzinger, an air power analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
Rather than simply basing a new warplane on the latest technology, Gunzinger says the Pentagon needs to first look at what it actually takes to win a likely war. “Scoping the operational concept is, I think, going to be very important to the kind of capabilities we want in the future.”
To that end, the Pentagon needs to stop thinking in terms of simply replacing existing fleets of jets, Deptula says. “We need to think less about a one-on-one replacement of a particular type of aircraft and think more about the effects that we want those aircraft to be able to achieve,” Deptula says.
And whatever new plane the Pentagon buys should be capable of doing lots of different things—not just shooting down other fighters. “In the case of the F-X, F/A-XX, or whatever designation you are using, what they are focusing on is the need to achieve and maintain air dominance, and that’s fine, we will need that capability,” Deptula says.
“But as we move into an era of greater and greater accelerating technological capability,” he adds, “I would suggest that we’re not going to build a single-mission platform.”
Data-sharing will be vital, Deptula argues. Advanced aircraft of the future could be “critical nodes” of a much larger “combat cloud” architecture that further blurs traditional divisions within air power. He says diverse missions such as air-to-air combat, bombing and reconnaissance should be “integrated into a single platform,” something that today’s warplanes already do, to an extent.
In the future the U.S. might be fighting enemies who are very different from those the nation has fought in the past. America could find itself at war with a high-tech foe instead of just another failed state or terror group.
A full-scale technological conflict could prohibit U.S. aircraft from using large, fixed bases near the front lines, as these facilities could be vulnerable to enemy attack. Instead, warplanes would fly into battle from far away, carrying with them all the fuel and weapons they might need for a sustained fight.
“You might begin to conclude that we might want a future air-superiority platform that has more range than we typically think a fighter has,” Gunzinger says. “Maybe a lot more range. And, frankly, we might want something that carries a great deal more payload.”
As such, the “the next-generation fighter might look more like a bomber,” Gunzinger points out.
Need for speed
But a sixth-gen warplane probably will not look like the Air Force’s new Long Range Strike-Bomber, Deptula says. The bomber is likely to be long-legged but slow. By contrast, a new fighter will still need to be fast in order to battle air-to-air.
“Speed is going to be a critical piece,” Deptula insists. Not coincidentally, the U.S. aerospace industry is working hard on advanced new engines that could operate efficiently at subsonic and supersonic speeds.
Meanwhile stealth is not going anywhere—advanced low observables are going to be as important as ever, Deptula says. But he grants that the ability to avoid detection by radar is no “silver bullet,” as Air Force leaders have sometimes portrayed it in the past.
Deptula points out that there are likely to be lots of different types of radars on a future battlefield. Even if a warplane’s shaping is less effective in avoiding a particular radar band, that jet’s stealth could still be useful against other frequencies.
Evading detection “still is today, and will continue to be in the future, a critical element—perhaps the most dominant element—in determining the survivability of future aircraft,” Deptula says.
The Pentagon is likely to want a new fighter with wide-band stealth effective against the latest crop of low-frequency radars, which are better able to detect current stealth jets, including the F-22 and F-35. “I’m talking about something that is highly survivable,” Gunzinger says of a sixth-gen plane.
Directed-energy weapons—that is, lasers and microwaves—might also add an entirely new dimension to air combat 25 years to 30 years in the future, Grant, Deptula and Gunzinger agree. “Aerial combat might have a directed-energy dimension to it that could really change the nature of how we do it and what we need,” Gunzinger says.
If, for example, a new fighter had a high-power laser able to destroy targets from far away, that could completely negate the need for close-in maneuvering. “It could be a complete game-changer,” Gunzinger says.
All this said, it’s probably too early to start spending money on an actual sixth-generation fighter program, Gunzinger adds. “I do think it’s a worthy endeavor to think about the kind of characteristics you might need in the future for an air-dominance platform.”
Because aerial warfare isn’t likely to go away.