Eurofighter collaboration faces industrial friction. Will this ambitious, AI-driven stealth fighter project overcome disputes and take flight by 2040?
by Kris Osborn, Warrior
French, German and Spanish hopes for a 6th-gen fighter now linger in a haze of uncertainty as early conceptual work continues on an ambitious effort to build an ultra-stealthy, fast and highly networked European 6th-gen fighter.
The idea is as ambitious as it is potentially paradigm changing, as the European countries envision an AI-enabled Future Combat Air System (FCAS) stealth fighter system capable of eluding advanced air defenses, controlling drone swarms, launching stand-off precision weapons and seamlessly sharing information across domains in milliseconds connecting air, surface, land and space. It is not clear if the project will come to fruition, as there are public reports of friction between France and Germany related to the industrial elements of the jet’s development.
Should these differences be reconciled, the FCAS program will likely stay on its course to engineer an operational 6th-gen fighter by 2040 or sooner. This centerpiece manned-platform is called the NGF, for Next-Generation Fighter, a 6th-gen stealth platform aligned in concept to a degree with what the Pentagon envisions for its F-47.
“Once operational, the fighter jet was envisioned to operate alongside a ‘remote carrier’, built by Airbus and MBDA, that would act as a loyal wingman for its manned counterpart. These systems would be networked with other assets through a joint combat cloud, also to be developed under the FCAS banner,” an interesting essay from Forecast International states.
An interesting essay in Army recognition states that the primary reason for potential cancellation is deep and persistent industrial and political disagreements between France and Germany, especially over leadership, workshare distribution, and control of key technologies. France’s aerospace champion Dassault Aviation has repeatedly sought to claim a dominant role in developing the Next Generation Fighter (NGF), reportedly pushing to handle up to 80% of the workshare for the aircraft’s design, engines, and sensors. This demand has alarmed German leaders and industry partners, who see it as undermining the originally agreed balance of cooperation and reducing meaningful participation by Germany’s Airbus and Spain’s Indra.
Amid these tensions, France and Germany have even discussed scrapping the joint fighter entirely and refocusing collaboration on the “combat cloud”—a digital command-and-control network that links aircraft, drones, sensors, and other assets, according to an essay in the Financial Times. While this cloud remains valuable for European defense cooperation, dropping the central fighter component would represent a dramatic downsizing of the original vision.
F-47 & Upgraded F-35 for Europe
Should the FCAS stall or reach an irrecoverable impasse, then Europe might need to further expand its collective F-35 effort or potentially acquire the F-47 should that be available for allied sale. In concept, FCAS seems quite similar to the F-47, as available renderings of FCAS seem to show a fully horizontal blended wing-body design optimized for stealth and speed. Much like the tailless F-47, the FCAS configuration appears to combine the stealth attributes of a bomber with the agility, vectoring and speed of a 6th-gen fighter jet.
The largest similarities between the F-47 and FCAS seem related to multi-domain networking and the concept of a combat “cloud.” FCAS is intended to operate as an integrated system connecting drones to a manned fighter, much like the F-47s Collaborative Combat Aircraft, drones operating in a loyal wingman capacity to the host fighter in position to operate their mission scope, flight path, weapons capability and sensor payload from the cockpit of the aircraft. Added to this concept of high-speed, next-generation manned-unmanned teaming, the FCAS program seeks to network satellites and enable the 6th-gen aircraft to function as an aerial “node” or “gateway” in the sky in position to receive, organize, analyze and transmit time-sensitive combat data across multiple domains in near real-time. NGF will likely fire laser weapons, harness advanced EW and explore new applications of propulsion technologies to optimize thrust-to-weight ratio.
Kris Osborn is the President of Warrior Maven – Center for Military Modernization. Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a highly qualified expert in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army—Acquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox News, MSNBC, The Military Channel, and The History Channel. He also has a Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University