The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Introducing the Next Generation Air Dominance Platform, F-47 || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: April 1, 2025

President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have announced the approval of the Air Force’s newest toy, the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) platform, aka the F-47 fighter jet.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/the-ngad-platform-f-47

Hey everybody, Peter Zion here coming to you from a sunny Colorado. Today is the 21st of March, and there was just a press conference between American President Donald Trump and American Defense Secretary Pete Hagseth, where they announced the launch of a new fighter program called the NGAD, the next generation air dominance fighter. It's been dubbed the F-47 because it's Trump's the 47th president. But anyway, you can't make it. stuff up. Anyway, in theory, will be made by Boeing and should come into manufacturing a few years. That's the goal. Before we go forward and talk about what it can do and implications,

let's talk about how we got here. So if you dial back to the 1990s and the early 2000s, the Defense Department realized that they had a window. The Soviet Union had collapsed, and the Russian Federation, which emerged from it, was a pale shadow of his predecessors. And so there was going to be an extended period of time where the Soviet-slash-Russians weren't going to be able to develop new air products. No new bombers, no new fighters. They did get a couple off the drawing board, but they were never able to produce more than one of them at a time. And even now, 35 years later, they only have 12 of some of their more advanced fighters. And that meant you had an opportunity to skip a generation. So Donald Rumsfeld, who was working

with the Defense Department at the time, had this idea that we will look at the best technologies we have available right now and build the absolute minimum that we possibly can, and then research the next generation. Back at the time, we were dealing with F-15s and F-16s, and the two programs that were green-lighted to proceed on that limited production basis, where the F-22 Air Superior Fighter, which I think is one of most badass pieces of military technology I've even heard of, can hit supersonic speeds without using its afterburners, and all of its weapons are in internal base,

so it has the radar cross section of a small bird. I mean, it is bad ass. And then the other one is the F-35 Joint Strike F-Factor, which is a flying pig from my point of view. Yes, it's better than what we had, but its range isn't very good. And the technology that's gone into it has had all kinds of teething pains,

and this has driven up the cost of the fighters to over $100 million per fighter, and it's not very good at doing what it needs to do because its range is so limited, and that's even before you put external weapons on it. The problem is it's a joint strike fighter. It's designed for both air-to-air combat and ground assault. And by being a multi-role platform, yes, you can do more,

but you don't do any of it particularly well. So we only made a few, less than 200, of the F-22s, even though they are the perfect tool for the job, because we also need ground strike. And so the decision was made to do more and more and more of the F-35s despite its many, many shortcomings. And that meant looping in lots of allies in order to help defray the overall production cost,

and that brought it down to $100 million per airframe. Anyway, Rumsfeld, and people like him, thought, you know, we'll just build the minimum we possibly can and then launch forward. Then the war on terror happened. And in the war on terror, what we discovered is we don't need an air superiority fighter against the Taliban because they don't even have blimps, much less jets.

But we do need ground strike. And so the F-22 was pushed to the side, kind of stuck with that initial plan of just a limited run, and the F-35 went into mass production, and we're getting lots and lots and lots of those. Fast forward to today. Because of the war on terror, we spent 20 years fighting ground wars, and we weren't able to put the resources that would have been ideal under the Rumsfeld plan into the next generation. We're only now getting there. It took this long. And the NGAD is supposed to be an air superiority fighter, the next. next generation after the F-22. Well, that leaves us with four complications slash problems.

The first is cost. We saw the cost of the F-35 go up and up and up and up and up, and up, and the NGAD got a really nasty review from an internal Pentagon audit, I think it was just last year or the year before, where they said it looked like the cost could be upward of $300 million per airframe. And the days of us being able to spread that across the alliance are gone. The Trump administration is creaning very rapidly to breaking most of our alliances, including the NATO alliance, which is where almost all of the F-35 sales we're making are going, and every country that is committed to buying them is now rethinking it. Because if the United States is not going to be there in a real fight,

not only are you not getting the implicit security guarantee that you thought you were getting, but if the Americans are responsible for all the tech and all the technicians, and all the repair work and all the servicing and all the software and a lot of the weapons, do you really want to be dependent on the Americans at all in this brave new world we seem to be falling into? So the F-35 is likely to get even more expensive, and no one is likely to sign up for the N-GAD at all. Problem two, range. This is a black issue. It's just an issue of classification.

We don't know what the range of the N-GAD is yet. It is in limited production, very limited, basically handmade, nothing manufactured. The manufacturing wouldn't begin for a few. years yet, three at the absolute low end. So this is a weapon system for the future, not for tomorrow. And until we know that range, it's really hard to know if this is going to give us some of the advantages of the F-16 and the F-22 or weigh us down with some of the restrictions of the F-35. We're just going to have to wait for more details on that. The third problem is that the NGAD is going to need a complement. It is an air superiority fighter in the vein of the F-3.

F-22. And we will still need something for ground attack. And if it's going to be the joint strike fighter, if that's what we're going to use for the next 30 years, then that puts some really huge limitations on what the United States can do militarily. Its range is just about 600 miles, not great in terms of deep strike. And if we are moving into a world where the United States is walking away from most of its alliances, then we're losing all the forward bases that allow us to launch these things in any meaningful way in the first place, which means we will also need a new ground strike jet. And that is an entirely new program that is going to have its own cost structure. And overlaying all of this is the question of technology. During the course of the last 60 years,

we haven't seen, actually almost 80 years, we haven't seen a lot of changes. I mean, yes, yes, yes. We've gotten better at stealth. Yes, yes, yes. Our missiles have gotten more accurate. All that's true. but we haven't really seen a change in what a fighter or what a fighter bomber does until really recently. In the last few years, we've had building breakthroughs in things like material science and digitization and energy transfer, and we don't know where this is going to take us in terms of military technology yet. The NGAD looks interesting to me. It's basically like a narrower version of the B2 bomber, which is a badass piece of equipment. But it's not a fundamental break.

The stealth is cool. Don't get me wrong. The stealth is awesome. But it doesn't do anything that you wouldn't expect an air superiority fighter to do. These three breakthroughs in technology are, in the very, very beginning stage, is giving us drone technology. And we have discovered that the Ukrainians, for less than 20,000 a pop, can build a thousand drones that can saturate a battlefield or for something closer to $200,000 a pop, develop

rocket drone. that can strike targets that are about as far away as the F-35 can reach. So we're seeing these newer technologies come in, and we don't know how they're going to mature. And so investing billions, tens of billions, hundreds of billions, into a new manned fighter program, you've got to wonder if this is the right call. I'm not saying it's not. I'm saying we don't know. and in a world where the United States is walking from its alliance structure,

the new systems are probably not appropriate to what basins we're going to have in a few years. I don't mean this so much as a condemnation of Trump, although there's plenty of that going around right now, but just a recognition that as our technological envelope evolves, one of two things has to happen. Either we develop technologies to match the geography or our deployments, or we change our deployments to match the evolution. of the technology and there's plenty of examples throughout history of both happening.

We don't know where we're at yet. What we do know is if we try to do both,