Stealth, Hypersonics and Prototyping! Oh My! A Glimpse at the Thoughts Behind USAF 6th Generation Fighter Development

The U.S. Air Force is launching a new air-supremacy effort designed to identify and develop next-generation technologies to maintain America’s air dominance through 2030 at the same time the future of stealth is being questioned.

The service has stood up teams to experiment and conduct technology demonstrations to identify innovations that will guide the service and its platforms into future in which the Air Force expects to face more threats from advanced militaries like China or North Korea, Lt. Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski, military deputy for Air Force acquisition, told Military​.com.

“We are going to be facing adversaries that are as modern as we are if not more so. This provides us the opportunity to leverage the entire world market of technology development through our collaborative activity with our allies,” she said.

The effort, which includes work with the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Pentagon’s research arm, DARPA, is looking at a wide range of future applications including hypersonics, stealth, advanced sensors, cyber technologies, drones, space systems and directed energy weapons, Pawlikowski said.

“We’re taking a more enterprising look at understanding and exploring the capabilities we are going to need in the future,” she said. “It is not just looking at a next-generation fighter but looking at these issues in the context of leveraging all of the capabilities that can accomplish that.”

Overall, the new Air Force initiative plans to use a lot of modeling and simulations to assess and verify the validity of new or emerging technologies, Pawlikowski said.

When it comes to hypersonic flight, Pawlikowski emphasized that the service will not only explore hypersonic weapons but also hypersonic aircraft designed to carry and deliver the weapons.

In addition, Pawlikowski said the effort will look to defeat the rapidly improving air defense systems. Many experts and analysts have made the point that stealth or low-observable technologies are less effective as faster computers processors, sensors and radar can jump between multiple frequencies and help locate stealth aircraft at increasingly longer distances.

Pawlikowski said stealth technologies will continue to evolve as a way to meet these emerging threats from more advanced air-defense systems. She did not specifically reference the Air Force’s new Long Rang Strike Bomber, or LRS-B, slated to enter service in the 2020’s – but she did say stealth applications are evolving far beyond their original or initial configurations.

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