The Air Force is in the midst of a large-scale endeavor to prepare for a potential showdown with China—an effort that will necessitate cutting-edge technology like stealthy jets and AI-powered drone wingmen. Just two months into the new presidential administration, it learned it will have a new tool in its arsenal: the first-ever sixth-generation fighter jet, the F-47.
President Donald Trump, flanked by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and a rendering of the F-47 peeking through a shadowy background, called the jet “virtually unseeable” with “unprecedented power.”
“America’s enemies will never see it coming,” Trump said during the Oval Office ceremony. “Hopefully we won’t have to use it for that purpose, but you have to have it. And if it ever happens, they won’t know what the hell hit them.”
Trump’s public stamp of approval of the F-47, named in part after the 47th president, signals a promising future for Air Force investment. But challenges lie ahead as the service balances high-ticket modernization programs, shifting budget priorities, workforce reductions, and an aging fleet.
Before the surprise F-47 announcement, Air Force officials had been ramping up calls to build the new jet, following months of deliberation and analysis to figure out what the service needs in order to win in a future conflict.
“I’m convinced from the analysis that [Next Generation Air Dominance] is necessary. That’s my opinion … and I will offer that to the senior leadership, but I can see the difference that it makes,” Air Force Chief Gen. David Allvin told Defense One in March during the annual State of Defense series.
The fighter almost didn’t make the cut. Former Air Force secretary Frank Kendall recently disclosed that the next-gen fighter had been left out of the 2026 budget request because the Biden administration couldn’t find the funding for it. While the exact amount the service will request for the jet remains uncertain, previous estimates have put the effort at more than $20 billion over the next five years.
That figure includes companions for the F-47: AI-powered robot wingmen, called Collaborative Combat Aircraft, designed to fly and fight alongside human pilots. These drones are a key part of the NGAD “family of systems,” and have been exempted from Hegseth’s sweeping 8% budget shift.
The CCA program is set to reach a major milestone this summer when the first prototypes fly. In March, the service made history when it announced novel mission designations for its prototypes—naming General Atomics’ prototype YFQ-42A and Anduril’s YFQ-44A.
Pending successful flight tests, the service plans to deliver 150 CCAs to operators over the next five years, Allvin told Defense One.
The service plans to buy a thousand of these drones to revolutionize its future fighter force. The service has long maintained that it needs to buy 72 fighter jets annually to provide relief to its aging fleet, but the service hasn’t been able to reach that number in recent budget requests—and with the advent of CCAs, that old benchmark is up for debate, Allvin said.
Upcoming fighter jet purchases “will be affected by collaborative combat aircraft,” Allvin said. “Understanding the human-machine teaming element of that will let us understand, do we need the same capacity? We’re finding that our pilots are able to manage and work with maybe more collaborative combat aircraft than we initially thought.”
The service hails the CCA program as a “fundamental change” in how it wants to buy and field platforms moving forward. Unlike previous acquisition programs, the government will own and control the system’s architecture, allowing it to update the program and buy new mission
systems as they are available.
“I am very pleased [with the program] because it not only proves out our ability to get these two platforms out there and test them, but it also proves out and validates the entire change in process where the government is taking back ownership to where we can control and perhaps be able to upgrade more rapidly than with platforms of the past,” Allvin said.
Picking two non-traditional defense companies to launch this effort will help build back the aerospace industrial base—one that deserves just as much attention as shipbuilding, Allvin argues.
“I see this fishbone chart about how we went through the Last Supper they called it in 1993, where massive defense industrial bases shrank to about five. I’m trying to flip that on its back and go the other way by owning the open architecture and letting more companies come in,” he said.
But with the NGAD “family of systems” emerging as a clear priority, some worry other efforts, namely a recapitalization of the mobility fleet, may fall to the wayside.
The service had once hoped to build a new, stealthy aerial refueling tanker called Next Generation Air Refueling System, or NGAS, to replace the services’ aging tanking fleet, but the plausibility of funding it alongside NGAD is murky. Service officials have said the two efforts are intertwined, since a larger, longer-range NGAD would reduce the need for a stealthy tanker that can operate closer to front lines.
Allvin has said there are ways to improve the survivability of the service’s current tankers, including electronic warfare and data connections to other platforms. “Next-generation aerial refueling system doesn’t necessarily mean a platform. It just means a new way to ensure survivability in a denser threat environment,” he said.
Still, upgrades can only go so far. Axing a next-gen refueler means the service will have to keep flying its KC-135 tankers possibly well past their 100th birthday, since the KC-10 Extender is retired and the KC-46 Pegasus continues to struggle with development problems.
And it’s not just tankers—the service is facing a readiness crisis across its entire fleet, which has been stretched thin through daily operations. Sustainment costs are rising as the fleet gets older and older, sending aircraft readiness rates to their lowest levels in years.
During his speech at the AFA Warfare Symposium in March, Allvin presented a chart that showed the average age of aircraft in the fleet rising from about 17 years in 1994 to nearly 32 in 2024. Meanwhile, aircraft availability rates went from 73% to 54%, and maintenance needs are increasing to fix aging aircraft.
Absent a major influx of cash to revamp the fleet, this trend will likely continue. Low readiness rates and tight budgets drove the service to ask for $1.5 billion in spare parts and another $600 million in readiness kits in its 2025 unfunded priorities list.
Allvin said new data tools will also help the service better manage spare parts and anticipate maintenance needs. “We now have been leveraging data analytics a little bit better to have a better sense of what $1 in will produce with $1 out of readiness…I feel more confident this year than I have before, because of the data analytics,” he said.
To shore up support—and funds—for his service, Allvin has been highlighting the service’s role in the Pentagon’s new priorities and calling for “more Air Force” to answer the administration’s call to rebuild the military.
“I do think that we need more Air Force, because we need to do the things that this president has said is a priority,” Allvin said, noting the service’s role in defending the homeland, the Golden Dome effort, and nuclear modernization.
Hegseth has already voiced his support for the Air Force, and said the service will be a “huge part” of how the military “gets funded.”
The service hopes it can gain in Hegseth’s 8% budget shift and get more funds than other services, Allvin said, adding that there isn’t an “expectation” that every service will have to pay for the shift equally.
“It really is about having more options for the president, in addition to just more Air Force, and not all those options will require massive land forces. If you can do it with air forces, you can get right back into a fighting position without having to commit so much in the nation’s blood and treasure,” Allvin said.
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