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In its quest to dominate the air battlefield of the future, the US Air Force may look to replace the traditional fighter jet with a network of integrated systems disaggregated across multiple platforms.

The Air Force on Thursday rolled out the initial findings of a team tasked last year to explore options for maintaining air superiority in the future battle space. The group, the Air Superiority 2030 Enterprise Capability Collaboration Team, found that the best path forward is developing a “family of systems” to address the range of threats in a highly contested environment

As near-peer adversaries like Russia and China continue to close the capability gap, building long-range missiles, anti-satellite and anti-aircraft weapons designed to foil US forces’ ability to penetrate, the Air Force must find new ways to dominate the air

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This family of systems, or “system of systems,” approach is the Air Force’s answer to the idea the US military is losing its advantage. The new strategy will include both stand-off capability and penetrating forces, with increased dependence on space and cyber to infiltrate enemy defenses and defend our own networks, Grynkewich said.

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The team will use this funding to explore concepts like the arsenal plane, hypersonic weapons, directed energy, autonomy, and electronic attack, the officials said.

But will the family of systems include a traditional fighter jet? Grynkewich seems to think not.

The Air Superiority 2030 team is trying to move away from the concept of a “sixth generation fighter,” a term that has long been used to describe the follow-on to the fifth-generation F-35, Grynkewich said. Even the word “fighter” may be outdated, he noted, preferring “sensor-shooter” or “node” in a larger battle network.

“Fighters are typically short range ­– we’ve got to field, to be able to operate from range,” Grynkewich said. “Do you put the sensors on the platform or do you disaggregate them somewhere else? . . . It starts to look like something very different from something that we would traditionally think of as ‘sixth-gen.’

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As it was originally envisioned, F-X would have turned into a 20 to 30-year development program, he stressed. Instead, the Air Force plans to start an AOA in January, 2017, to look at options for “what we can get short of a 20 or 30 year leap,” he said. The effort, called “Next Generation Air Dominance,” is planned to be complete by the middle of 2018, Grynkewich said.

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As to the broader Air Superiority 2030 effort, the officials offered few concrete answers to what the force of the future will actually look like, saying there is more work to be done.

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