The U.S. Air Force is firmly of the view that its new F-47 6th generation stealth fighters are key to “how we win” in future fights, according to the service’s top general in charge of force structure planning. Though the Air Force previously said it would buy 200 of the next-generation combat jets, how many of the aircraft the service now plans to acquire is an open question as its vision of the core air superiority mission set continues to evolve.
Air Force Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel talked about the F-47 and how it factors into his service’s current work on a new overarching force design during a virtual talk that the Air & Space Forces Association (AFA) hosted today. Kunkel is currently the director of Force Design, Integration, and Wargaming within the office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Air Force Futures at the Pentagon.
Kunkel described the announcement in March that Boeing’s F-47 had won the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) combat jet competition as “a fantastic day for the Air Force” that has “assured air superiority for generations to come.” The Air Force had put the NGAD combat jet program on hold for a deep review last year, which ultimately concluded that the service needed to acquire the aircraft to be best positioned to achieve air superiority in future high-end fights.
“The F-47, the capabilities that it brings to the fight, are game-changing for us,” he continued. “It doesn’t change the character [of] the fight just for the Air Force, it changes it for the joint force. It allows us to get places – allows the joint force to get places where it otherwise couldn’t. It allows us to move closer to the adversary [and] allows us to counter the adversary in ways we can’t [now].”
Kunkel said that he could not provide any more granular information about the F-47’s design and capabilities due to the high degree of classification currently surrounding the program. Air & Space Forces Magazine reported last week that the F-47 concept art that the Air Force has released to date has been heavily manipulated to obscure key details about the actual aircraft. You can find TWZ‘s previous in-depth analysis of what has been shown so far here.
“The F-47, I think, is a perfect example of a war-winning story, a coherent narrative, [a] cohesive ‘hey, this is how we win,'” Kunkel added today. “This is how the joint force wins.”
There are still questions about how exactly the F-47 will fit into the Air Force’s future force structure and how many of the jets the service might actually purchase.
“We won’t be able to get to F-47 force structure numbers in this conversation,” Kunkel said today in direct response to a question from the author. “It does point to a larger question of, we’ve got a force design, how do you transition that force design into force structure, and then is there a force-sizing construct that needs to accompany it? And that larger force-sizing structure or concept is something we’re working on right now.”
During a quarterly earnings call yesterday, Boeing’s CEO Kelly Ortberg also said he could not offer any details about the current F-47 contract beyond what the Air Force has already announced.
In 2023, then-Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said that his service was working around a future force planning construct that included 200 NGAD combat jets. That aligned with the original vision for what was first referred to as the Penetrating Counter-Air (PCA) platform, which was intended as more or less a one-for-one replacement for the existing F-22 Raptor stealth fighter. In July 2024, Air Force Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, head of Air Combat Command (ACC), said that there was no longer a firm timeline for replacing the F-22 at all, and it is unclear how those plans may have further changed since then. Significant F-22 modernization projects are underway now, which have also been feeding into the larger NGAD initiative.
These questions are directly tied to the Air Force’s still-evolving vision of what achieving air superiority – the primary expected mission of the F-47 – will look like in future conflicts.
“I was part of the group that did the [NGAD combat jet] analysis, and said, ‘hey, is there a different way to do this? Can we do this with the current capabilities?'” Kunkel said today. “I guess we probably didn’t need to do the analysis, because what we found is we found out that we were right, that air superiority, in fact, does matter.”
At the same time, “there’s an evolution in how we do air superiority, right?” Kunkel added. “All domains is [sic] enabled by air superiority. So the Air Force must continue to provide it.”
“But there might be places where air superiority, it doesn’t turn into air supremacy. And on this scale, it goes from ‘blue’ or U.S. air supremacy, and goes down to your superiority, and then goes down to neutral, and then ‘red’ is on the other side,” he continued. “There’s probably places where there’s mutual air denial. Where no one’s no one has air superiority, but we’re denying the air domain to the adversary. And I think, in some of these cases, that may be perfectly acceptable, where we don’t have this dominant presence all the time.”
This is in line with a concept of “pulsed airpower” operations the Air Force has outlined in the past, defined as a “concentrating of airpower in time and space to create windows of opportunity for the rest of the force.”
“Now, is that your superiority? I don’t know. I tend to think it is, but it may not be,” Kunkel further noted today.
The video below offers a view of how the Air Force has described the air superiority mission in the past.
As already noted, the air superiority mission set was absolutely central to the development of the NGAD combat jet requirements that led to the F-47. Kunkel himself highlighted just earlier this year how critical the jets are expected to be in providing a forward airpower presence, especially in heavily contested environments.
“You’ve got to be forward in order to sustain the tempo that’s required to bring the adversary to a sneeze. So an all-long-range force, … it sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? You sit in Topeka, Kansas, you press a red button, the war gets fought. Nobody gets hurt. It’s all done at long range,” Kunkel said during a talk at the Hudson Institute think tank in Washington, D.C., in February. “[But] it doesn’t win because it just can’t sustain the tempo of the fight.”
The service has also previously made clear in the past that plans for the NGAD combat jet, as well as its future fleets of Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) drones and next-generation aerial refueling capabilities, are all directly intertwined. The Air Force is still very much refining its vision for how it will employ CCAs and is similarly ironing out requirements for future aerial refueling capabilities. The forward drone controller role is still expected to be another key task for the F-47.
“CCA integration with F-47 makes the F-47 better,” Kunkel said today.
Budgetary considerations will have an impact on the ultimate F-47 force structure, as well. Just completing the jet’s development is expected to cost at least $20 billion on top of what has already been spent. The aircraft’s estimated unit cost is unclear, but has been pegged in the past at three times the average price of an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, or upwards of $300 million based on publicly available information.
Separately this week, Lockheed Martin, which lost the NGAD combat jet competition to Boeing, also pitched the idea of a major “NASCAR upgrade” for the F-35 that could “deliver 80% of 6th gen capability at 50% of the cost,” according to the company’s CEO Jim Taiclet. Kunkel said today he had not heard about this ambitious proposal, but would be interested in talking with Lockheed Martin about it.
Regardless, a major realignment of priorities is currently underway across the entire U.S. military under President Donald Trump. Despite expectations that some existing programs will be cut, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said the total U.S. defense budget request is set to rise to around $1 trillion. Kunkel and other Air Force officials have been and continue to be bullish on their service coming out ahead in the end budget-wise.
“So, when you say balance out the budget, what we can’t do as a nation is say that the Air Force needs to balance out its budget,” Kunkel said today. “The Department [of Defense] needs to balance its budget, and the resources need to follow the strategy. … If the strategy has changed – which I would argue that the strategy for the last 30 years is not the strategy for the future – if the strategy has changed, then the resources need to follow the strategy. Here’s the truth. The truth is that future fights depend on the Air Force to a greater extent than they ever have.”
There are still concerns about what tradeoffs the Air Force may need to make in order to afford its F-47 plans on top of other expensive top-tier priorities, including the future LGM-35A Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile and the forthcoming B-21 Raider stealth bomber. There has notably been renewed talk in recent months about increasing planned B-21 purchases.
“When I left the Pentagon, the Department of the Air Force had a list of unfunded strategic priorities that were higher priority than NGAD. At the top of the list were counter-space weapons and airbase defense,” Kendall wrote in an op-ed for Defense News earlier this month. “Our new F-47s – and all of our forward-based aircraft – will never get off the ground if we don’t address these threats through substantial budget increases.”
Kendall had already disclosed that he had been willing to trade the NGAD combat jet for new investments in counter-space capabilities and improved base defenses during an episode of Defense & Aerospace Report‘s Air Power Podcast put out in March. During the podcast, Kendall, together with former Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology & Logistics Andrew Hunter, provided a slew of other new details about the F-47 and its origins, as you can read more about here.
Overall, the Air Force’s current leadership is clearly very committed to the F-47, but how the service expects to eventually weave the jets into its future force structure plans looks to be still evolving.
Contact the author: joe@twz.com