Next-Generation Air Dominance Platform (NGAD) Expected to Fly with Unmanned Drones

Video Above: What Role Would 5th Generation Stealthy Fighter Jets Play in a War with China?

By Kris Osborn – President & Editor-In-Chief, Warrior Maven

6th-Generation Stealth Fighter 

The already airborne Air Force 6th-generation stealth fighter will operate as part of an integrated “family-of-systems” including unmanned drones, manned jets and a new generation of networking technologies, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall explained.

“NGAD must be more than just the next crewed fighter jet. It’s a program that will include a crewed platform teamed with much less expensive autonomous un-crewed combat aircraft, employing a distributed, tailorable mix of sensors, weapons, and other mission equipment operating as a team or formation,” he said in an Air Force report.

Kendall described this concept in terms of defining a “system-of-systems” concept for the Next-Generation Air Dominance platform. 

Certainly the Air Force has shown that advanced AI-enabled computer algorithms are capable of processing information in milliseconds, making decisions and performing quite well in dog-fights, at times prevailing over human pilots. 

However, there are certain more subjective variables best addressed by human faculties, such as emotion, intuition and an ability assess a variety of factors in relation to one another.