We have known it for some time now: the US Air Force, the United States Air Force, has been working for a few years on its Next Generation Air Dominance program, or NGAD, its sixth generation of combat fighter. She is working on it so actively that some solid clues indicate that a first device may have already been flight tested as early as 2020.
Not much is known of this jet of the future, of course, although analysts are lost in guesswork as to the advanced technologies that such a device, intended to counter the growing threat from China and, to a lesser extent, of Russia, will have to integrate.
We know for sure that the thing will be an airplane. Who therefore, a priori, will steal. It will undoubtedly go fast, it will undoubtedly be very handy, will be equipped with revolutionary reactors. It can be used in swarms and networks, in the plural in both cases, piloted by humans or, perhaps, by an artificial intelligence (AI). It may be joined by combat drones, such as Boeing’s Loyal Wingman.
More as The War Zone explains, the NGAD is not only a flying machine, as futuristic and formidable as it is. It is a much more global concept, a complete technical and sensory system whose heart is a doctrine that the US Air Force calls “spectral warfare” or “spectral domination” (spectral warfare or spectral domination in English).
See it all, know it all, feel it all
Is this a question of a war waged on ghosts, like in a famous film from the 1980s in which you know who to call when danger lurks in the neighborhood? A priori not – or else, we are missing some elements.
“A simple official definition of what spectral warfare or spectral domination is seems to be nowhere to be found at this time”regrets the journalist Joseph Trevithick in The War Zone. Who notes, however, as the site often does, that many leads can be found or guessed at in the fine print lines of Pentagon budget documents.
A no-brainer, because this is the meaning of technological history: like the new F4 version of the Rafalethe NGAD will be an electronic and connected warfare platform, a path that the air forces of major nations started borrowing a long time ago.
The goal of the Pentagon is, it seems, to greatly accelerate the development of this war of the future, in particular by providing the aircraft and their pilots with “cognitive” capabilities for apprehending and managing combat situations, supported by the ‘artificial intelligence.
The current work on the dogfights (air combat) of F-16 fully autonomous and powered by AI seems to be going in this direction, like the combat drone project called “Skyborg” which, precisely, could replace the aging all-purpose hunter.
But the concept of spectral domination and this computer-aided situational intelligence also go through the invention (or improvement) of a series of sensors and sensors allowing devices to see everything, know everything, analyze everything, in the all imaginable spectra.
Budgets have thus been allocated to find ways to gain the upper hand, offensively or as a countermeasure against increasingly sharp anti-aircraft defenses, in the infrared, to create new sensors for the missiles of the future, jammers more powerful and more capable than those with which the planes of rival nations will be equipped, lasers capable of disrupting the action of enemy projectiles.
In short, it is a question here of (again) getting ahead of China in particular, whose Pentagon publicly fears the exponential technological progress in the field of missiles, electronic warfare or stealth. To the point of doing everything, including imposing a blockade on the most advanced components and semiconductors, to hinder this constant progress.
