00:00What would you do if you were king and rivals were lurking around, challenging for the crown?
00:13Would you be like Dre and bite prey?
00:16Or would you spend billions of dollars every year for over a decade to build the most powerful fighter the world has ever seen?
00:23Armed with capabilities the world has never seen to bring untold destruction to rivals, the U.S. Air Force went with untold destruction to rivals.
00:42Get ready. You're about to be briefed on a highly classified project.
00:46It's no news that the U.S. budget's more for defense than any other nation in the world.
00:52A lot more.
00:54Many billions in these budgets are going to one single program.
00:58The NGAD program.
01:00The NGAD program is designed to create a family of systems whose members are technological innovations.
01:06Among them, new weapons, sensors, electronic warfare suites, battle management capabilities, engines.
01:12But most notably, new unmanned loyal wingmen, known as the Collaborative Combat Aircraft.
01:19And a new manned fighter known simply as the NGAD fighter.
01:24Over $4 billion has already been spent on the NGAD program.
01:29And a lot more is underway.
01:30The Pentagon's proposed budget for the fiscal year 2025 amounts to $850 billion.
01:39$815 million of this goes into continued work on the Air Force's NGAD fighter alone.
01:46This is a substantial increase over last year's request of $276 million.
01:52Once in service, this fighter may be the most expensive fighter in not just the world, but in all of history.
01:59After all, the fighter the NGAD fighter will replace is none other than the F-22 Raptor, the current most expensive fighter in the world.
02:09It's therefore no surprise that the Air Force's overall request for the NGAD program as a whole, year over year,
02:16has grown from just over $1.9 billion to nearly $2.75 billion.
02:22$11 billion will be spent on the program over the next five years, and at least $40 billion on the program overall.
02:31The major recipients of these high-dollar numbers include the NGAD fighter, whose capabilities we'll see in a minute,
02:39and the Collaborative Combat Aircraft Loyal Wingmen, whose capabilities we'll see right now.
02:45Collaborative Combat Aircraft, or CCAs, are the unmanned Loyal Wingmen section of the NGAD program.
02:56They harness cutting-edge disruptive technologies such as autonomy, machine learning, and artificial intelligence
03:02to support manned fighters in executing their missions.
03:05The Loyal Wingmen can perform a variety of tasks during missions,
03:09from carrying weapons and flying ahead to provide intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance,
03:14to electronic warfare and even striking targets directly.
03:19Fielding such collaborative aircraft in their numbers is one way to achieve comprehensive battles-based surveillance
03:24and agile combat employment from different altitudes at different angles,
03:29making mission planning dynamic and flexible.
03:33These are benefits that the U.S. Air Force cannot afford not to have.
03:37The service plans to spend over $6 billion over the next five years on developing CCAs.
03:44The Air Force is expected to launch a competition in 2024 to decide which contractor will develop these aircraft.
03:51Anduril, Boeing, General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman
03:55are the five contractors already working on possible CCA designs.
04:00A down-select from the initial five contractors down to two or three is expected later this year.
04:06Dozens of additional firms are supporting the program through the development of autonomous technologies,
04:12sensors and other mission systems, command and control capabilities, and more.
04:17The goal is to have a CCA design actually in production by 2028.
04:22It's quite a reach, but then again, the CCA development may not be starting from scratch.
04:28Some programs which share a similar goal with CCAs already exist.
04:33DARPA's Air Combat Evolution,
04:35Boeing Australia's MQ-28A Ghost Bat Project,
04:39and the Air Force Research Laboratory's Skyborg program
04:42are only some of such programs aimed at developing manned-unmanned teaming capabilities in the skies.
04:49The Skyborg program already appears to be the choice for the Air Force.
04:53The service proposed $51.7 million in its 2024 budget proposal
04:59to transition Skyborg's autonomous flight technology to CCA programs.
05:04So some progress has been made with these unmanned aircraft.
05:08Once complete, each CCA is expected to cost between $20 to $40 million.
05:13At roughly the same price of an F-16 Fighting Falcon,
05:17they aren't expendable drones by any means.
05:20The Air Force plans to acquire at least 1,000 CCAs.
05:25It also plans to have 500 manned fighters in its fleet.
05:28Therefore, a pair of CCAs will be assigned to each manned fighter in the fleet.
05:33This fleet will include 300 units of the 5th generation F-35 Lightning II
05:38and the 200 units of the lethal, mighty capable, 6th generation ENGAD fighter.
05:44ENGAD stands for Next Generation Air Dominance,
05:51which is exactly what it's made to achieve.
05:54Air Dominance of the Next Generation of Aircraft.
05:58To achieve this, an entire suite of new technologies must be produced,
06:02which is where the new sensors, engines, weapons, and other capabilities come into play.
06:06They all work together towards the common goal of air dominance.
06:11The most crucial part of this program is the ENGAD fighter,
06:14and it is what will feature the majority of the technologies being developed in the program.
06:19The result will be a fighter that wields capabilities right out of a science fiction movie.
06:25Capabilities such as advanced stealth.
06:28The ENGAD fighter will build on the stealth technology of previous American aircraft,
06:33fighters, and bombers alike.
06:35Like the B-2 Spirit, the stealthiest aircraft in service today,
06:39the ENGAD fighter will take an overall triangular shape,
06:43internally hold its payload, and have no vertical stabilizers.
06:47It is the first fighter ever to have such a revolutionary design.
06:51Vertical stabilizers had always been required to keep an aircraft airborne
06:55until the concept of active flow control came to life in the B-2 Spirit.
07:00Active flow control uses computer brains on board
07:03to constantly adjust the flow around the aircraft to keep it airborne,
07:07similar to how birds fly.
07:10Open architecture.
07:12Decades of history have taught the U.S. that an aircraft will always have room to be better,
07:18no matter how advanced it already is,
07:20especially with near-peer adversaries becoming more near-peer by the day.
07:25Therefore, the ENGAD fighter will come with an open architecture
07:28that enables the fighter to take on new upgrades easily and quickly.
07:33This way, the fighter will constantly adapt to newer challenges of the battlefield
07:37that are introduced by the advancements of opposing militaries.
07:41To put it simply, the 6th generation ENGAD fighter can be upgraded
07:45to become the 7th generation ENGAD fighter years after it's fielded.
07:51Maximum connectivity.
07:52To swiftly gather relevant information about its surroundings and act on that information,
07:58the ENGAD fighter is slated to wield the most sensitive sensors ever installed on a fighter.
08:04The Air Force will do away with radars mounted on the aircraft
08:08for electronically configured smart skins integrated into the aircraft's fuselage to achieve this.
08:14Information acquired by these sensors will be made available to other members of the fleet,
08:19whether 6th generation or not, to keep the entire fleet of friendlies abreast of relevant information in real time.
08:26The Air Force fleet instantly becomes a tightly interconnected force in the sky,
08:31and it's all in large part thanks to the connectivity of its new fighter.
08:36New spectrum of weapons.
08:38The ENGAD fighter will be armed to the teeth with weapons the Raptor, its predecessor, wields, and more.
08:46Like the Raptor, the new fighter will wield missiles, bombs, and possibly a massive rotary cannon.
08:52Unlike the Raptor, however, the ENGAD fighter could wield laser-directed energy weapons
08:56that take out threats with high-intensity laser beams.
08:59These come with an entire slew of advantages over legacy weapons.
09:041. Laser weapons have unlimited magazines,
09:07as they continue to fire for as long as they're connected to some power source.
09:112. They strike targets at a speed of 180,000 miles per second.
09:17The speed of light.
09:18The fastest thing in the universe.
09:21Targets would have to do the impossible to evade them.
09:243. Laser weapons are autonomous in operation,
09:27as they execute the majority of their work without human intervention.
09:32The Air Force has multiple laser weapons in the works,
09:35but the most promising of these remains the Self-Protect High Energy Laser Demonstrator,
09:40or S.H.I.E.L.D. for short.
09:42S.H.I.E.L.D. is being developed by a team of Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin,
09:47three of the most capable defense contractors in the world,
09:50and the three most likely contenders to build the fleet of 6th Generation ENGAD fighters.
09:55At least until Northrop Grumman dropped out of the running last year.
10:00Northrop Grumman is a contender in the U.S. Navy's ENGAD equivalent program,
10:04and is also developing the B-21 Raider, the Air Force's most advanced bomber yet.
10:10The company already has a lot on its plate, and besides that,
10:14would the Air Force want the same company producing its two most advanced aircraft?
10:18Considering that Lockheed Martin, which has been building the most superior fighters in history,
10:24is available?
10:25That's anyone's guess.
10:27Currently, Boeing and Lockheed Martin are the two prime contractors contending for the ENGAD fighter contract.
10:32How that will go is also anyone's guess,
10:35but a competition between the two primes would be the likely decider.
10:39The global polity continues to heat up.
10:42Wars have broken out, and more seem just a few years away.
10:45The U.S. is at the center of a number of these, as rivals continue to get more daring.
10:51In response, a new family of air-dominant systems are taking shape,
10:56and they promise to do what every powerful family does,
11:00stick together and destroy their enemies.
11:03If that sounds like a plan, give this video a like and subscribe to this channel for the ENGAD family.
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