Key Points and Summary – Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is still trying to slow-roll the Navy’s sixth-generation F/A-XX program, arguing the U.S. industrial base cannot support two stealth fighter efforts at once alongside the Air Force’s F-47.
-His stance collides with the Navy’s urgent need to replace aging F/A-18E/F Super Hornets and EA-18G Growlers, even as the service warns it is “running out of time” on carrier airpower.
F/A-XX U.S. Navy Fighter. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
-Fleet leaders want at least Super Hornet–level quantities of F/A-XX to keep decks filled, but Hegseth’s letter to Congress makes clear the Pentagon is not yet ready to greenlight a winner.
SecDef Hegseth Continues Opposition to Navy 6th-Generation F/A-XX Fighter
There have been several “false starts” in the form of rumors that an announcement awarding the US Navy’s 6th-generation F/A-XX fighter to one of the two remaining prime contractors could happen “at any minute.”
Each time, it turned out to be a case of the adage that rumors are about what you pay for them.
And now we know why.
Bloomberg obtained just yesterday a November 18 letter to the US Congress in which US Defense Secretary (SecDef) Pete Hegseth continues to voice his opposition to the Navy selecting a contractor for this effort anytime soon.
His position remains that the US aerospace and defence industrial base lacks sufficient facilities and engineering talent to develop multiple tailless, stealthy, next-generation fighter aircraft in parallel.
The Pentagon “strongly supports its original fiscal 2026 request reevaluating the F/A-XX program due to industrial base concerns of two sixth-generation programs occurring simultaneously,” Hegseth wrote in the letter.
F/A-XX Fighter. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
The Pentagon faces a few challenges in attempting to design and build these two aircraft. The greatest of these is that there are distinct differences, particularly in structural design and maintenance issues, between a land-based and a carrier-capable aircraft.
Separation of Carrier and Airbase
Speaking with Forbes this past July, Wayne Shaw, director of Aerospace & Defense at consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, explained just how different the worlds of land-based aircraft and carrier-capable fighters are.
As he detailed, the two services have widely divergent needs, and the two aircraft would be performing two very different missions.
The US Air Force (USAF) F-47 program, awarded to Boeing in March, will be an air superiority fighter that replaces the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor, while the F/A-XX will be a multirole carrier-based fighter. A design for a single aircraft that covers both services’ largely non-overlapping sets of requirements is considered impossible.
“As someone who flew a jamming variant of the F-111 and finished my flying as a US Navy Weapons School Instructor in the EA-6B, let me remind the readership that we learned this lesson with the F-111 in the 1960s,” said Shaw. “The requirements for a carrier-based aircraft are substantially different than those for a land-based aircraft, plain and simple.”
The stress put on an airframe by catapult launches and carrier landings is “punishing to airplanes,” said Shaw.
The airframe structure design must withstand the rapid acceleration of the catapult launch and the deceleration of the “trap,” the naval aviator’s slang term for a successful arrested landing aboard the carrier flight deck.
“In addition to needing a beefy tailhook, another aspect of carrier-based versus land-based operations is the need to have folding wings for storage aboard the carrier” below decks. “The F/A-XX will need to do that, whereas the F-47 will not,” he added. “Also, the F/A-XX will need to be built for the corrosive salt-water atmosphere of ocean-going aircraft carriers.”
Economies of Scale and Time Constraints
But the greater issue for the Navy is that the current aircraft flown off the carriers, the Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, has its origins in a fighter contract fly-off that took place more than four decades ago.
The last batch of these aircraft to be built was purchased last year, and these are the proverbial “end of the line.”
An F/A-18 Super Hornet from Naval Air Station Oceana, Virginia, performs an aerial demonstration over Rickenbacker International Airport, Ohio, June 16, 2024, as part of the Columbus Air Show. This year’s event featured more than 20 military and civilian planes, including a KC-135 Stratotanker from the 121st Air Refueling Wing, which served as the base of operations for military aircraft participating in the show. (U.S. Air National Guard photo by Senior Airman Ivy Thomas)
As early as the early 2000s, Pentagon airpower specialists said the aircraft’s design had been modified and upgraded as much as possible, “for a carrier aircraft design from the previous century.” The Navy, said one retired Pentagon analyst, “is just plain running out of time to replace the Super Hornet.”
The Navy thus finds itself in the position of having the world’s newest and most modern aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford. Still, paradoxically, one of the oldest carrier-capable fighters in the world is operating off its flight deck.
Small wonder that the Navy’s annual “Unfunded Priorities List” for fiscal 2026 includes $1.5 billion for the F/A-XX program that will replace what is described as “the aging Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornet.”
But whenever the US Navy decides on a major contractor for the F/A-XX, the numbers will matter.
Building a new fighter in the present day dictates that economies of scale are more critical than ever.
The more purchased, the lower the price per unit, and the more it is possible to amortize the development of so many new cutting-edge and exotic technologies.
Over 600 combined F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and EA-18G Growler were purchased by the Navy.
The F/A-XX would have to be procured in at least these numbers, or greater, since it will replace both types in service.
This is particularly critical if there will almost always be 3-4 dozen aircraft unavailable for active duty.
They will instead be needed to meet training and testing requirements or to be returned to a depot for upgrades.
The F/A-XX is a case where any penny-pinching could end up being more than pound-foolish.
About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson
Reuben F. Johnson has thirty-six years of experience analyzing and reporting on foreign weapons systems, defense technologies, and international arms export policy. Johnson is the Director of Research at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation. He is also a survivor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He worked for years in the American defense industry as a foreign technology analyst and later as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Departments of the Navy and Air Force, and the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia. In 2022-2023, he won two awards in a row for his defense reporting. He holds a bachelor’s degree from DePauw University and a master’s degree from Miami University in Ohio, specializing in Soviet and Russian studies. He lives in Warsaw.
