The US does not want to repeat the "Joint Program" nightmare of the F-35 with the 6th Generation NGAD, the "Next Generation Air Dominance Fighter"
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is currently disappointing in terms of the performance of its systems and the effectiveness of its global maintenance and sustainment system, ALIS. The first decade of the US Air Force's existence is in a "tangle" because of the F-35.
The structure of the F-35 procurement and sustainment program has led to a "monopoly" and the US Air Force certainly does not want to make the same mistake before and after the USAF inducts its next stealth jet, the NGAD.
Once the 5th Generation F-35A/B/C variants were in active service with the USAF, USMC and US NAVY, the US intended to supplement them with the 6th Generation aircraft as soon as possible, and to make the air force an integrated 5th and 6th Generation force.
What was the aim? After all, all three air forces need an attack aircraft with similar characteristics, so why conduct separate procurement and sustainment programs? The idea was to design a single basic aircraft, divide it into three variants with mostly identical systems, and conduct a joint program for both procurement and lifetime sustainment, thereby achieving enormous financial savings in the design determination, aircraft construction, test and evaluation, and sustainment phases. This idea sounded great in theory, but in practice it did not develop and evolve in this way at all.
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, on which nearly 30 years of time and money have been spent, is currently disappointing in terms of the performance of its systems and the effectiveness of the global maintenance and sustainment system ALIS. The first decade of the US Air Force's life is in a "tangle" because of the F-35.
For this reason, neither the US Air Force (USAF) nor the US Navy (US NAVY) want joint-purpose aircraft and aircraft support programs in the 6th Generation NGAD. Both forces want a 6th Generation jet fighter, both want it to be an "air dominance fighter", but both the USAF and US NAVY are running two different NGAD projects with the same name.
Why are the USAF and US NAVY running different NGAD programs?
Why don't both the USAF and US NAVY run a joint program for an aircraft with almost the same conceptual design, which they call NGAD, and why don't they try to field another joint service aircraft, as they did with the F-35?
Until the F-35, the US Air Force had been designing and managing the maintenance and overhaul of the aircraft they paid for, with the F-35 this task was completely given to Lockheed Martin, making Lockheed Martin a complete "monopoly" throughout the life cycle of the F-35, and this monopoly did not perform as well as it should have.
The 6th Generation NGAD aircraft contractors and the maintenance of the aircraft will be carried out in line with the USAF and US NAVY's pre-F-35 concepts.
