Washington. March 8th. INTERFAX - The United States plans to take 200 stealth fighters of the sixth generation, created as part of the Next-Generation Air Dominance program (NGAD), into the combat composition of the Air Force, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said, the American military publication The War Zone reports.
Together with thousands of innovative unmanned combat escort fighters being developed under the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program, as well as 300 fifth-generation F-35 fighters, they will become the basis of the future tactical strategy of air combat of the US Air Force, Kendal said, speaking at a round table during the symposium of the Association of Air and Space Forces in Aurora, Colorado.
"The Department of the Air Force is moving forward with the creation of a family of systems for the next generation of air supremacy," Kendall said. "It will include both the NGAD platform and the use of unmanned support aircraft."
"The plan is to have 1,000 (unmanned fighter support) CCAs," Kendall said. "This figure is made up of the estimated two CCAs for (each of) 200 NGAD platforms and two more for each of the 300 F-35s, a total of 1,000."
According to the US Air Force, the use of NGAD paired with unmanned combat support fighters equipped with artificial intelligence will allow performing complex military missions with much less losses.
According to the Pentagon, the flight of the first serial American combat stealth fighter of the sixth generation, created under the NGAD program, is planned to be made no earlier than 2030.
So far, not a single operational version of this fighter has been produced in the United States. As part of this program, a prototype of the first flight model of a promising aircraft was built, designed for conducting preliminary flight tests and testing basic technologies.
The NGAD program is a family of systems that includes a sixth-generation manned fighter, combat support drones, new weapons such as the AIM-260 joint advanced tactical missile, and possibly other secret systems.
The tactical and technical data of the new fighter are strictly classified. According to open sources, NGAD fighters should be able to enter the so-called A2/AD - Anti-Access/Area-Denial areas (high-risk areas that NATO troops cannot penetrate without unacceptable damage to them, even with superior forces), breaking through any air defense systems, destroying aircraft and the most important enemy targets.
