Unless, part of the F-35 buy is cancelled and becomes 4+++ NGAD.How many aircraft do you think the USAF is going to produce under the Digital Century Series?Honestly, I do not see the AF and the Navy developing their own plane. They have to work together. I can't see how they are gonna find the money for 2 different planes. Congress won't allow it. Same plane, two versions, like the F35A/C is the best solution imo. What do you guys think?
Depends on whether Congress wants these to remain in the digital space or appear in the physical space. If we spend a lot of time and money on building 4th gen aircraft, and cutting 5th gen aircraft then I see us fielding a pretty robust NGAD capability in the digital sphere only. If you take CSAF at his word, that the service will not look to take funding from its current 5th gen modernization portfolio and move that to NGAD then you really have 2 options to fund NGAD. One will be to retire older aircraft, free up resources and use that to finish work on NGAD and buy it. Or you hope that the AF budgets grow. If we don't see either, I feel that we'll continue to have digital designs that don't make a physical appearance until much later, perhaps a lot after things like Skyborg etc have been fielded. So you could have a situation where you have lots of digital designs with multiple teams doing some design work but you can't really shape all that into a fieldable acquisition program because your funding keeps getting trimmed moving schedules to the right. The original idea seemed to have been to have multiple digital designs being developed and fielded in smallish numbers each so I'm basing this on the AF wanting to continue down that path.
What about using the digital capabilities to field "4th gen" fighters?
Yes that is what I said. If you use some of that capability to field clean sheet 4th gen, or 3rd gen fighters then you are not going to have money to fund the same technology to field the higher end NGAD system. As the CSAF described (if what he said is also reflected in actual budgets), older systems will have to make room to pay for the future NGAD. If you aren't divesting fleet X to pay for NGAD-X but instead are using that money to build a cheaper or better F-16 then you clearly aren't putting the NGAD into production unless more funding is made available. In the end someone (something) has to pay the bill.
Problem with that is you'd be stopping buying aircraft, while you spend money to develop something that will take time to be R&D'd, tested, and then produced. More likely scenario would be that they pull R&D money from one program to fund another. There is no clean sheet 4+++ or 5--- program that is ready to enter production where it could begin to compete with the F-35 for acquisition in the near to mid term. The longer you prolong this the less that program makes sense. Again, as @Josh_TN has written, if you want a 4+ gen then you have three, in production aircraft to chose from in the F-15 EX, the F-16 V, and the F/A-18E. These are capable aircraft, in production and in service with extensive testing. Why in the world do you need yet another similar class of aircraft unless you go for something much much simpler and cheaper (and less capable)?
I am also highly skeptical to the claims that somehow buying newer variants of platforms designed 5 decades back makes the design and industrial base healthy. If that was the main driver, then it is wiser to take that money and go all in on Skyborg, MQ-Next, and NGAD..things that are cutting edge and likely to bring in new concepts, technologies and push maturity down the design and industrial base. F-15EX and F-16V could be looked at as a means to rapidly boost capacity in the short term in addition to buying the F-35A or to introduce competition to keep the F-35 program and its suppliers honest. But beyond this, they should be pumping R&D money into the future systems. From cheap attritable systems to the higher end NGAD. The CSAF statements ahead of and during vAWS just comes across as a total SNAFU.
That's the whole point of the Century Series, building the tools to get to the point where its trivial in cost to design and certify a new fighter. Now, it's only a matter of if a new fighter can be built and operated on the cheap.