The Pentagon did not get the memo on the death of manned combat aircraft in the 21st century. Is the 47 designation the year the first aircraft may be aloft?
Don’t believe any promises on price or schedule much less efficacy.
They will not deliver.
China’s two mysterious fighter jets broke cover in late 2024, throwing security mandarins across the world in a tizzy. In response, the Donald Trump administration finally unveiled the Next-Generation Air Dominance air superiority fighter F-47 at the White House on March 21.
But wait, there’s more:
One of the major criteria for CCA is to be price effective. So, the manned fighter jet will not have to carry every system. As per the vision outlined by the former USAF Secretary Kendal: “Right now, a fighter might carry a targeting pod, it might carry weapons under its wings, it might carry a self-protection jammer. And those systems are integrated into a single platform … Once we introduce CCAs, we can start talking about effectively taking some of those things off of that fighter and putting them on a CCA — but not all of them.”
The Pentagon would want to be tight on budget after the cost overruns in F-35 development. According to original estimates, the 6th-generation fighter was predicted to cost around US$300 million apiece, but Kendall said in 2024 that they would like to keep the price similar to the F-35 Lightning II—about US$100 million, depending on the variant.
Allvin said in a statement that the F-47’s price tag will be lower than an F-22 — which has a unit cost of around US$143 million. The Air Force requested US$2.7 billion for the platform in its budget request for fiscal 2025, indicating that it planned to spend US$19.6 billion on the aircraft over the next five years.
If the F35 is any indicator of future acquisition, take a look at this. The government and the usual suspects knew about all of this more than a decade ago.
In 2012, we have this:
https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/35-fighter-plan-acquisition-malpractice-pentagon-official/story?id=15530008
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me
