Mini Stealth Saga: More X-2 Taxi Tests

India Postpones Reusable Launch Vehicle Technology Demonstrator Test to February

The winged Reusable Launch Vehicle Technology Demonstrator (RLV-TD) was scheduled to be tested in the first week of February.

link (paywall).

US Navy to Shift to Offensive Capabilities in Development

The Program Executive Office for Integration Combat Systems will release a first-ever 30-Year Combat Power Plan to accompany the 30-Year Shipbuilding Plan in the spring, outlining how the Navy will outfit its platforms and network its sensors to keep up with the threat environment and technological advances.

The 30-year plan will help align various communities in the Navy, as well as industry and lawmakers, to encourage for the right research and development, the right systems engineering and the right investments in people and infrastructure, PEO IWS Rear Adm. Jon Hill told USNI News in a Nov. 24 interview.

Trying to plan for 30 years out is a challenge, he said. Satellites and space will become more important, but it is unclear how the Navy could best leverage it. Cyber will be important, but only time will tell how much it will affect defensive and offensive operations. Directed energy and supersonic weapons could eliminate the need for dangerous propellants on ships, but only if researchers can advance current technology so that lasers become powerful enough and hyper velocity weapons fast enough.

What is certain, Hill said, is two things: the Navy needs to increase its offensive capability, and it needs to effectively operate an entire netted force rather than just individual ships and planes. Both those future requirements will necessitate a new way of thinking, and for that reason the timing is right for a 30-year combat power plan.

link.

F-35 Pilots Under 136 lbs Restricted From Flight

Concerns about increased risk of injury to F-35 pilots during low-speed ejections have prompted the US military services to temporarily restrict pilots who weigh less than 136 pounds from flying the aircraft, Defense News has learned.

During August tests of the ejection seat, built by Martin-Baker, testers discovered an increased risk of neck injury when a lightweight pilot is flying at slower speeds. Until the problem is fixed, the services decided to restrict pilots weighing under 136 pounds from operating the plane, Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, F-35 integration office director, told Defense News in a Tuesday interview.

“The bottom line is, they have to get into the realm where the seat allows that weight of a pilot less than 136 pounds [to] safely eject out of the airplane,” Harrigian said. “They found some areas that particularly at slower speeds they were concerned about, so that drove the restriction that we have right now.”

At least one F-35 pilot is affected by the weight restriction, according to Joint Program Office spokesman Joe DellaVedova, who added that the rule was announced Aug. 27. The issue does not affect the first and only female F-35 pilot, Lt. Col. Christina Mau, 33rd Operations Group deputy commander, he noted.

link.

Note: Lt Col Mau hunts down reporter stating her weight and strafes him.

The US Navy Report on Progress on Railgun, Laser and Hypervelocity Projectiles

link.

Future Military March #1: of Lasers, Pain Rays and Railguns

I had started out writing about military lasers and how they were virtually here and some of the history and implications.  Its only about a third done.  However, the blogosphere exploded with tons of news on lasers and their status and whatnot.  So I am going to scrap that post in favor of a quick run down on on the news and links much like the Robopocalypse Reports.

First off the Russians are doing their classic pull out the old Soviet equipment (or claim to) to try to compete with the American new tech.  In this case, they are claiming they are pulling back from museums (or threatening to) old blinding laser tanks.  Yup, the USSR built lasers in turrets on T-80 chassis to blind optics and whatnot.  Its a larger version of what the US Army developed with the AN/VLQ-7 Stringray laser for the Bradley IFV.

Secondly, the Iranians decided to fire a laser on a US Navy ship and helicopter in the Gulf of Aden.  It was low powered and obnoxious rather than damaging.  However, it prompted Secretary of the Navy Mabus to tell the US Navy to get its act together and move faster with deploying those lasers they have been developing.

 Breaking Defense walks through the status of various laser programs and the battle they face.

The US Air Force has retained some retired C-130U gunships for laser weapon demonstrations.  These demos would be for both offensive (attack ground target, etc) and defensive (shoot down incoming antiaircraft missile) weapons.  Even for Active Denial System (aka pain ray) tests.  Actually the US Special Forces want the ADS specifically for nonlethal options.  The USAF has stated they believe lasers will allow more flexibility and capability.

It should be noted the HELLADS laser which is, at report, 150 kw is being tested at WSMR. DARPA has offered the laser to the navy to test on a Burke class destroyer in 2018 and to the US Air Force as well.  The goal, which seems to have been met, is to have no more than 5 kg per kilowatt of beam power.  A 150 kw HELLADS would weigh 750 kg.  A single module, each producing a 75 kw beam, is said to be 130 cm by 30 cm by 50 cm (51.2 inches by 11.8 inches by 19.7 inches).  The modules can be aggregated to at least 300 kw or possibly more (as I've said before).

The USNI discusses the Navy's plans for laser - to send a 150 kw laser to sea in 2018 - and its plans for railguns.  A manually loaded railgun will be put to sea on a Joint High Speed Vessel next year.  The follow-on railgun with the ability to fire 10 rounds per minute will go to sea in 2018.  The Navy finished the study on placing a railgun on the last Zumwalt class destroyer.  As I have stated before, in the tour de force USS MC Perry class (and here), they really ought to place one on the Independence derived class Small Surface Combatant frigate.  The space and the layout just makes sense.

The US Army is beginning to get into the railgun mood (but Jane's hides it well).  Their interest is in ballistic missile defense and presumably general air defense since there will be times when the Army's lasers will be degraded by weather.

Iowa State Develops Micro Tentacle Manipulators

If you had to grasp a tiny delicate object such as a blood vessel, doing so with traditional tweezers would be a very painstaking process – just a little too much pressure, and the object could be crushed. Instead, scientists from Iowa State University have developed miniature coiling tentacles for doing the job. They're even capable of holding an ant without harming it.

The tentacles are actually microtubes measuring just 8 mm long by about a quarter of a millimeter across, that are composed of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) elastomer.

link.

You know the Japanese anime crowd are going to love this tech.

Aeromobil Flying Car Prototype Crashes

It's not easy to perfect a car that can fly.

On Friday, the Aeromobil 3.0 prototype flying car was on a test flight in Slovakia when eyewitnesses say it went into a tailspin.

Its inventor and the man behind the controls, Stefan Klein, 54, parachuted out of the vehicle before it hit the ground, the Prague Post reports. Klein reportedly only sustained minor injuries.

A statement from AeroMobil offered that Klein "encountered an unexpected situation and activated the advanced ballistic parachute system in an altitude of approximately 300 meters (900 feet)."

One word that wasn't in the company's statement was "crash." Instead, AeroMobil said: "The system has proved itself fully functional and landed the entire vehicle without any injury to the pilot."

However, images published by Slovakia's Nitra show that the aerial vehicle looked rather damaged. The front end looks especially mangled.

link.

US to Offer Joint Development of Scorpion Attack jet to India

US defence secretary Ashton Carter's two-day visit to India in early June is expected to raise the levels of bilateral strategic and defence co-operation between the two countries, senior Indian military officials have told IHS Jane's .

Carter will sign a 10-year India-US Defence Framework Agreement and fast-track the Defence Trade and Technology Initiative (DTTI), under which the two countries will co-develop and co-produce military equipment in India.

Industry sources said that under the DTTI, which Carter initiated as deputy defence secretary in 2012, the US was expected to offer the Textron AirLand Scorpion light-attack and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft currently being developed to the Indian Air Force (IAF).

Air Chief Marshal Arup Raha, who is believed to have expressed interest in the Scorpion, believes the twin-seat platform can double as an intermediate jet trainer (IJT). The IAF badly needs an IJT due to delays to the Sitara (Star) platform, which Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) has been developing since 2005.

At the 2014 Farnborough Airshow, Textron officials told IHS Jane's that the Scorpion would cost less than USD20 million to procure and around USD3,000 per hour to operate. The company has also outlined a sales target of 2,000 platforms to international operators over the coming years. It did not respond to requests for comment on the potential deal with India.

link.

US Navy Details Sea Test of new BAe Railgun, Hints at Zumwalt Class Getting Railguns

Next year Naval Sea Systems Command will conduct the first at sea test of its electromagnetic railgun, hurling a guided 44 pound projectile and hypersonic speeds off the coast of Florida, NAVSEA officials said on Tuesday.

The BAE Systems designed test weapon will be mounted on the newly delivered Joint High Speed Vessel USNS Trenton (JHSV-5) and taken to Eglin Air Force Base’s maritime test range off the Florida panhandle late in the summer of 2016. The Navy originally planned to use the JHSV USNS Millinocket (JHSV- 3) for the test.

“It’s a naval surface fire support demonstration, the Navy’s first to engage an over the horizon target [with a railgun],” Capt. Mike Ziv, NAVSEA’s program manager directed energy and electronic warfare program office told attendees at the Navy’ League’s Sea-Air-Space 2015 Exposition.

The test will validate the assumptions the Navy has made in the decades pursuit of the railgun not only as a long range weapon to support troops ashore but start testing new ideas of using the weapon as an anti-surface warfare (ASUW) weapon, a ballistic missile defense (BMD) tool and as a close in weapon system for cruise missile threats.

NAVSEA outlined the expanded mission set for the railgun — beyond naval surface fire support — in a request for information issued earlier this year.

Traditionally, the Navy has used missiles to intercept targets but the railgun promises similar results for less money.

“There’s a tradition that every time an enemy throws a threat at us our counter to that threat is one order more of magnitude expensive than the threat costs. This is a technology where we’re engaging threats at similar probabilities of kill for a cost that’s about two orders of magnitude less,” Ziv said.

[...]

The Florida test will place a static floating target at a range of 25 to 50 nautical miles from the test ship and fire five GPS guided hyper velocity projectiles (HVP) at the target as the final part of 20 planned firings for the railgun at the Eglin range.

“It’s an over the horizon engagement. We’re firing on a ballistic trajectory and guiding into intercepting that target,” he said to reporters following the briefing.

“Eventually when we have a little bit more advancement in the projectile there will be some ability to communicate with [the round].”

As the program develops, the Navy is zeroing in on about 10,000-ton sized guided missile cruisers and destroyers as the anticipated platforms to field the weapons.
NAVSEA is currently conducting an in-depth study of including the railgun on the Zumwalt-class (DDG-1000) guided missile destroyers for the first platform for the weapon.

Earlier this year, Vice Adm. William Hilarides indicated his preffered option would be the third Zumwalt — Lyndon B. Johnson (DDG-1002) — currently under construction at General Dynamics Bath Iron Works (BIW).

link.

DARPA's Project to Make Software Never Become Obsolete

One unfortunate fact of modern life is that functional new software becomes non-functional old software with depressing regularity. For most people, this means predictable episodes of frustration, but for the US military, it's a more serious problem. DARPA's new Building Resource Adaptive Software Systems (BRASS) project aims to take a major shot at avoiding this obsolescence by developing software systems that can still operate properly a hundred years from now.

As systems become more complex, the problems of compatibility and obsolescence become more important. Perfectly good devices may be unusable, vital data may be inaccessible, and communications may be impossible. A simple example of this is the BBC Domesday Project of the 1980s, which digitized the famous 11th century Norman census of England's assets. The project was successful, but the LaserVision discs that the data was stored on were almost forgotten until 2002 when it was realized that their formatting was obsolete and would soon be impossible to access, resulting in a major preservation effort.

For the US military, the problem is more than just frustration; it can have an impact on national security. Even when updates are available, installing and configuring them is costly both in terms of money and time as the problems of backwards compatibility and degraded interoperability in military systems becomes more apparent.

BRASS is a four-year research project that looks at the computational and algorithmic requirements needed to build software systems that can remain functional for over a century. The idea is to produce systems that can actively adapt to changes in the computer environment. According to DARPA, this will require going back to a very basic level, developing new linguistic abstractions, and creating resource-aware program analysis aimed at monitoring changes in computer environments and making the software react accordingly.

Currently, applications work on a software stack made of many layers of abstractions. Getting to through these layers means using different program interfaces. Unfortunately, these interfaces are often informally and incompletely documented inside the interface software itself – if at all. This makes understanding the system extremely painstaking and difficult, it not almost impossible at times. In addition, this makes keeping applications working properly over time without automatic updates difficult, costly, and leads to premature obsolescence.

link.

US Navy to Test Aerial Refueling of X-47B Drone

The Navy plans to perform an aerial refueling for the first time on its carrier-launched demonstrator drone aircraft, the X-47B, within the next few weeks, service officials said.

The refueling, to take place at Patuxent River Naval Air Station, Md., will have the X-47B link up with an Omega air refueling tanker, Navy officials told Military​.com. Omega is a contractor that works with the Defense Department.

The X-47B made history when it flew from a carrier in May and November of 2013 and is now working on streamlining carrier deck operations and maneuvers with manned aircraft.

The Navy has launched and landed a carrier-based drone in rapid succession with an F/A-18 fighter jet as part of a series of joint manned and unmanned flight tests aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt in August of last year off the coast of Norfolk, Va., service officials said.

After an eight minute flight, the X-47B executed an arrested landing, folded its wings and taxied out of the landing area before moving out of the way for an F/A-18 to land, Navy officials said.

Navy engineers worked on some slight modifications to the X-47B aircraft in order to allow it to both land and integrate in rapid succession with fixed-wing fighter jets.

[...]

Aerial refueling technology is central to the debates about UCLASS because larger fuel tanks affect the size, shape and contours of the body of the aircraft and affect its stealth properties by changing the radar cross-section of the aircraft.

Some design proposals for UCLASS would make the drone less stealthy and less able to carry a larger weapons payload – yet be able to travel very long distances as an ISR platform. Other proposals focus more on stealth and weapons payload.

If UCLASS were designed for maximum stealth and weapons-carrying potential from its inception, engineers would most likely envision an aircraft with a comparatively smaller tank in order to lower the radar cross-section of the aircraft. A differently-configured fuel tank might result in the need for more aerial refueling as a way to extend the aircraft’s range and ensure long-endurance ISR, analysts have explained.

link.

Japanese Military Embraces its Anime Side, Begins Military Powered Armour Project

Last December, Japan’s defense research organization proposed allocating $7.5 million of its 2015 budget towards research into “highly mobile powered suits.”

Which sounds awesome. If anyone can craft Iron Man style robotic armor, it’s Japan, right? Don’t hold your breath. As the U.S. military has learned, exoskeletons are still a long way from the battlefield.

link.

And War is Boring, especially James Simpson, is very, very skeptical.

Britian Planning Laser Demonstrator & Lockheed Destroys a Truck With a 30 KW Laser

The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) has disclosed plans to compete the build and demonstration of a prototype high power laser directed energy weapon.

A supplier briefing for the project - known as the Laser Directed Energy Weapon Capability Demonstrator (LDEW CD) - is to be hosted by the MoD's Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) in mid-April. The announcement of this event has followed the release of a prior information notice in February.

According to Dstl, the aim of the capability demonstrator "is to enhance the UK's understanding of the capability of laser-based weapon system, as well as assisting in the prediction of the anticipated system performance". It added that the project "will consist of system studies and hardware trials, culminating in a number of practical demonstrations".

No details of the power, laser type, or proposed platform for the LDEW CD project have been released to date. However, Dstl has confirmed that the project demonstrations will be required to establish five key metrics: the ability to detect, acquire and track targets at range and in varying weather conditions with sufficient precision; the ability to generate and precisely control a high energy laser; control of the irradiance of the laser; management of power and cooling demands whilst enabling operation of the laser over a prolonged period; and control requirements, particularly managing the risks such that the laser is safe to operate.

Dstl said it expects to award a single contract to cover the design, build, and test of the capability demonstrator. However, it added that, given the broad range of capabilities required to meet the LDEW CD research requirement, it "is not expected that a single supplier would be able to fulfil this requirement in its entirety". This infers an expectation that industry players will coalesce into multi-disciplinary teams to bid for the contract.

link.

The battlefield of the future recently came a step closer, as a Lockheed Martin laser weapon took out a truck in a field test. The 30-kW fiber laser weapon system was fired at a small truck mounted on a test platform, the laser beam disabled the running engine and drivetrain within seconds.

The recent field test used Lockheed's Advanced Test High Energy Asset (ATHENA) ground-based prototype, single-mode laser, which is based on the company's Area Defense Anti-Munitions (ADAM) laser weapon system. It incorporates the 30-kW Accelerated Laser Demonstration Initiative (ALADIN) fiber laser developed by Lockheed.

ATHENA uses a process that the company calls Spectrum Beam Combining. Though laser weapons have been successfully tested in the past, Lockheed says that even though such systems could acquire, track, and destroy targets, they lack practicality as a tactical weapon because the inefficient nature of the lasers resulted in them being too large, needing too much power, and being difficult to cool.

Spectrum Beam Combining overcomes these limitations by using fiber laser modules where the active gain medium consists of an optical fiber doped with a rare-earth element such as erbium, ytterbium, neodymium, or others. The optical fibers are flexible, so the laser can be thousands of meters long for greater gain, while taking up very little space because it can be coiled like a rope. The large surface-to-volume ratio means that it's easy to cool. In addition, fiber laser are very durable and project a high-quality beam using 50 percent less electricity than an equivalent solid-state laser.

link.

Russian Project 4202 Boost Glide Hypersonic Weapon Test Failure on February 26th

Russia appears to have conducted a flight test of the Project 4202 vehicle on February 26, 2015 from one of the silos in Dombarovskiy. Project 4202 is believed to be some kind of a hypersonic vehicle that will be delivered by the UR-100NUTTH/SS-19 missile. (See also the earlier post.)

Project 4202 launches have never been officially acknowledged, but bits of information appear here and there and there are enough dots to connect, so there is a fairly high degree of certainty that the launch indeed took place. ([RSNF] must say that [RSNF] can claim no credit for finding the dots - most of them have been discovered by others.)

First, TsENKI (Center for Operation of Space Ground-Based Infrastructure) in its 2014 acquisition plan listed two Project 4202-related contracts. In the document, the launch is scheduled to take place in January 2015, but it was later postponed. Industry sources were said to confirm that the test was moved to February.

And indeed, on February 26, 2015 a note on a Russian site, which is known to be well connected and generally reliable, said something to the effect that a test is upcoming. The post has been removed since, but only after it was updated to say that the test was unsuccessful.

Finally, a number of people have found a message posted by someone from Yasnyy (which is the name of the city at the Dombarovskiy missile base) later on February 26. The author said that in Yasnyy people felt a missile launch that took place around 13:00 local time (that would be 8:00 UTC).

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Orbital ATK Test Fired Hit-to-kill Anti RPG Helicopter Active Protection System

Launched from a fixed ALE-47 Countermeasures Dispense System, the HAPS Kill Vehicle (KV) was able to perform pitch maneuvers and fly to a detonation point that simulated the location of an incoming rocket-propelled grenade (RPG).

The HAPS system consists of an Engagement Management Module, a slightly-modified Counter Measures Dispense System, such as the ALE-47, and the KVs that launch from the counter-measures dispenser.

link.

If it works for helicopters, you can bet it can for tanks.  Whoa nelly then!

US Navy Looking to Accelerate Virginia Payload Module Schedule

The Navy is looking into the feasibility of accelerating design and development work on the Virginia Payload Module (VPM) in case the service decides to begin production earlier than the 2019 planned start, Navy acquisition chief Sean Stackley said Wednesday at a House Armed Services Committee (HASC) hearing.

The VPM will add 28 missile tubes to Block V Virginia-class attack submarines (SSN-774), to provide more strike capability from undersea as the fleet prepares to lose the Ohio-class SSGN guided missile submarine fleet in the mid-2020s. The Navy planned to start VPM construction in conjunction with the next Virginia-class multiyear contract in 2019, but Stackley said that the SSGNs represent a 600-missile capacity and that sooner is better when it comes to rebuilding that strike capacity.

Stackley told the HASC seapower and projection forces subcommittee that he had spoken to the Program Executive Office for Submarines and to the submarine industrial base “to take a look at, can we in fact complete those design and development activities earlier than the 2019 timeframe to give the Navy and the nation the option to determine whether or not we want to advance Virginia Payload Modules earlier than the submarine build cycle.”

“We’re looking at first, can we pull [design and development] to the left a year, and the other aspect is what would be our ability to increase the rate of production of VPMs beyond one per year, which is in our current long-range plan.,” Stackley later elaborated. “Affordability comes into play, industrial base capacity comes into play.”

He said the discussions were ongoing and he would know by March or April what the options were in terms of accelerating VPM progress, though subcommittee chairman Rep. Randy Forbes (R-Va.) pressed for the information sooner to help inform ongoing budget discussions in Congress.

link.

David Autor: the Robopocalypse Isn't Nigh

David Autor knows a lot about robots. He doesn’t think they’re set to devour our jobs.

As an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who focuses on the impact of automation on employment, he’s in a good position to know. He’s surrounded by people creating many of the machines behind the latest wave of techno-anxiety.

His is “the non-alarmist view,” he says.

The 50-year-old believes automation has hurt the job market—but in a more targeted way than most pessimists think. He also doesn’t see the automation wave killing a wider array of jobs as quickly as many predict. Machines are invading the workplace, but in many cases as tools to make humans more productive, not replace them.

His research—presented in August to a packed audience of international central bankers in Wyoming—shows middle-skill jobs like bookkeeping, clerical work and repetitive tasks on assembly lines are being rapidly gobbled up by automation. But higher-paying jobs that require creativity and problem-solving—often aided by computers—have grown rapidly, as have lower skilled jobs that are resistant to automation, resulting in a polarized labor market and stagnant wages.

But many other economists and tech-watchers are ringing a louder bell.

“We’re entering an era where human beings are becoming dispensable in more parts of the economy and at a faster rate than ever before,” said Vivek Wadwa, a futurist at the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University.

A recent Pew survey found just under half of technology experts said automation would displace “significant numbers of both blue- and white-collar workers” over the next decade. Some said it would leave “masses of people who are effectively unemployable.” But the other half said it will create more jobs than it destroys.

Mr. Autor—who always sports a single gecko-shaped silver earring, his trademark symbol also pasted on his iPhone—says the fear has outpaced reality. Automation is advancing, but we are still far from the day when machines can do complex physical and mental tasks that are easily and cheaply done by humans.

He encourages people to watch online videos of robots developed for the Pentagon, some built by his MIT colleagues. “They’ll put them in the field and if a gust of wind unexpectedly nudges a door open, they tip over,” he says with a chuckle.

Stirring the latest wave of worry is a broad set of technologies ranging from mechanical robots that do specific tasks, like move semiconductors around a factory, to computer programs that can do legal research, write stock reports and translate conversations.

Mr. Autor’s latest paper, presented to a packed audience at this year’s meeting of central bankers at Jackson Hole, Wyo., emphasized how difficult it is to program machines to do many tasks that humans find often easy and intuitive. In it, he played off a paradox identified in the 1960s by philosopher Michael Polanyi, who noted that humans can do many things without being able to explain how, like identify the face of a person in a series of photographs as they age. Machines can’t do that, at least not with accuracy.

This is why big breakthroughs in automation will take longer than many predict, Mr. Autor told the bankers. If a person can’t explain how they do something, a computer can’t be programmed to mimic that ability.

link.

Korean Stealth Fighter KF-X to be Retendered

The mega-competition to build South Korea's indigenous fighter jet, dubbed KF-X, kicked off on Feb. 9. But the first round of bidding in the country's largest-ever arms procurement deal failed due to an insufficient number of participants.

Only the team of Korean Aerospace Industries (KAI) and Lockheed Martin submitted a proposal for the KF-X program by the deadline, according to the Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA). Under the local procurement rules, all defense development and manufacturing programs must have at least two bidders.

The second round of bidding, which will close Feb. 24, is expected to be a two-way race as Korean Air vows to lodge its bid in collaboration with Airbus Defence and Space.

Without a competitor, the KAI-Lockheed team would win the 8.6 trillion won (US $7.8 billion) project for developing an F-16 class twin-engine fighter aircraft over the next eight years.

About 120 fighters are scheduled to be produced after 2023 to replace aging F-4s and F-5s. Indonesia will provide 20 percent of the development costs, with a domestic company covering 20 percent, and the government supporting the rest.

"We're preparing to submit a proposal by the deadline of the second round of bidding, in collaboration with Airbus Defence and Space," a Korean Air spokesman said, adding his company signed an agreement with the European defense firm for the KF-X partnership.

link.

US Air Force has VERY Different Vision for 6th Generation F-X Fighter Than US Navy's FA-XX

Air Combat Command chief Gen. Herbert "Hawk" Carlisle says stealth will be "incredibly important" for the F-X aircraft that the U.S. Air Force is pursuing as an eventual F-22 replacement.

The Air Force is intending to follow a methodical path of risk reduction, Carlisle said. He suggested this harkened back to earlier days in developing aircraft decades ago. With the F-35 and F-22, new technologies were required during development, driving up cost and delaying introduction into service.

Carlisle said the Air Force intends to include as much prototyping, technology demonstration and systems engineering work as possible leading up to a program of record. He spoke with reporters at a Feb. 12 roundtable at the Air Force Association’s Air Warfare Symposium here.

link.