Brief comment on the F-47 / NGAD
Today President Trump revealed a contract award for the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance program. The aircraft, called the F-47, will eventually replace (or supplement) the F-22 as our leading air superiority platform. While we didn’t get much detail about what capabilities the aircraft will have, we do know about one interesting feature: the F-47 will have a pilot.
A lot of people responded to my last post with millenarian AI hype that, if true, would undermine my conclusion that cutting-edge chip production is not of national security importance to the United States. It’s useful to recall here that on the most ambitious timeline, the F-47 will enter operation in around 2034, mass production a few years later, and then fly throughout the 2040s and 2050s. If we use more recent Air Force projects as a guide, that timeline could take as long as 30 years. I think it’s interesting that the U.S. military does not believe AI will be ready for unmanned systems to handle the full spectrum of air combat operations by then.