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The lower cost claim was not just made by the administration (SecDef) but also by the CSAF on a second occasion and later included in the press-release. But as I and others have mentioned, it was vague enough and not directly linked to procurement cost or any specific acquisition metric. Open mission systems, rapid upgradability and continuous competition was defined as a key strategy on NGAD so it could well be that the AF wants to highlight better availability and lower operating cost relative to the decades old F-22's. Having said that, if the AF is going to go out of the way to highlight this, I'm sure Congress would want details on what this means so perhaps we will learn more over time as various admin and service officials testify during the FY26 budget process..Unlike the LRS-B award where the acquisition boss fielded questions and publicly released cost estimates, we have not received anything like that from the AF other than the mention of a $20 Billion EMD phase with pre-production aircraft and options for first few low rate lots.

<blockquote data-quote="bring_it_on" data-source="post: 771475" data-attributes="member: 10064"><p>The lower cost claim was not just made by the administration (SecDef) but also by the CSAF on a second occasion and later included in the press-release. But as I and others have mentioned, it was vague enough and not directly linked to procurement cost or any specific acquisition metric. Open mission systems, rapid upgradability and continuous competition was defined as a key strategy on NGAD so it could well be that the AF wants to highlight better availability and lower operating cost relative to the decades old F-22's. Having said that, if the AF is going to go out of the way to highlight this, I'm sure Congress would want details on what this means so perhaps we will learn more over time as various admin and service officials testify during the FY26 budget process..Unlike the LRS-B award where the acquisition boss fielded questions and publicly released cost estimates, we have not received anything like that from the AF other than the mention of a $20 Billion EMD phase with pre-production aircraft and options for first few low rate lots.</p></blockquote><p></p>

[QUOTE="bring_it_on, post: 771475, member: 10064"] The lower cost claim was not just made by the administration (SecDef) but also by the CSAF on a second occasion and later included in the press-release. But as I and others have mentioned, it was vague enough and not directly linked to procurement cost or any specific acquisition metric. Open mission systems, rapid upgradability and continuous competition was defined as a key strategy on NGAD so it could well be that the AF wants to highlight better availability and lower operating cost relative to the decades old F-22's. Having said that, if the AF is going to go out of the way to highlight this, I'm sure Congress would want details on what this means so perhaps we will learn more over time as various admin and service officials testify during the FY26 budget process..Unlike the LRS-B award where the acquisition boss fielded questions and publicly released cost estimates, we have not received anything like that from the AF other than the mention of a $20 Billion EMD phase with pre-production aircraft and options for first few low rate lots. [/QUOTE]

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