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| US Prepares Loyal Wingman Project for Its Sixth Generation Fighter |
International Military - Next-General Air Dominance (NGAD) is the main program for the United States Air Force (USAF). Simultaneously, the USAF will begin a contest for additional wingman drones.
USAF Secretary Frank Kendall also recently announced that the service could launch contests for drone partners. The aircraft will be used alongside a sixth-generation manned fighter in early fiscal year 2024. He also spoke at the 2022 Defense News Conference in Arlington, Virginia about this.
According to Kendall, the Air Force is currently in "preliminary talks" with industry players. This is because they developed an acquisition strategy for the program known as Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA).
The CCA program will field one or more types of drones as components of the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) system family. "We have to get money from Congress to do this," he said during the Defense News conference.
Like the NGAD manned aircraft, there will be few details about the loyal wingman drone program in the public domain, Kendall added. “This will be a black program. It will still be classified and we don't want to reveal what we did," he said.
The USAF has not officially announced the drone's role under the NGAD family of systems. However, it is expected to conduct broad operations focused on Intelligence, Reconnaissance, and Surveillance (IRS) missions.
Quoted from the Bulgarian Military, although NGAD is currently a “mystery program”, the complexity of its implementation will make it difficult to oversee the entire puzzle of its acquisition. If the NGAD project is realized and implemented, observers and experts say, the US will gain an air superiority over Russia and China.
It will not only catch up, but will also be in front of the two countries. The US Air Force's NGAD program is intended to replace one of the two US combat aviation flagships, the soon-to-be-retired F-22.