Allvin: Air Force owns more tech on F-47, dodging F-35 mistake

The Air Force’s acquisition strategy shift on the F-47 sixth-generation fighter will give the service greater ownership of the jet’s technology and allow quicker and easier future upgrades, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin said Tuesday.

In a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Allvin confirmed to Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., that the service is taking a markedly different acquisition approach to the Boeing-made F-47, previously referred to as Next Generation Air Dominance, than it did on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

“The primary difference is that we now have more control over the [F-47] project as it moves forward,” Allvin said. “We have in-sourced more. We have more ownership of the tech base. We guided a government reference architecture, so we own the mission systems. And so others can come in and play, but we own the development, the upgrade.”

A government reference architecture, or GRA, is a road map provided by the government that guides a program’s design, development, production and sustainment processes.

Top Air Force officials, particularly former Secretary Frank Kendall, have publicly expressed regret for how the military’s F-35 deal with Lockheed Martin was structured. In a May 2023 roundtable with reporters, Kendall lamented the Pentagon did not obtain rights to the F-35’s sustainment data from Lockheed Martin when the original deal was signed.

This stemmed from the acquisition philosophy of the time, called Total System Performance, which meant the contractor on a program would own it for the system’s entire life cycle.

The Government Accountability Office also highlighted in a September 2023 report the consequences of failing to obtain rights to F-35 technical data, which have hindered the military’s ability to sustain the jet on its own and slowed down repairs.

Kendall felt so strongly that this was a major misstep that in the May 2023 discussion, he referred to it as “acquisition malpractice,” and said such an approach creates “a perpetual monopoly” for the contractor.

He pledged the Air Force would not make that “serious mistake” on the NGAD program and said the service would have access to the intellectual property it needs. Kendall also said the NGAD aircraft would use a modular open system design that would allow the Air Force to bring in new suppliers as it upgrades parts of the system.

Allvin’s comments Tuesday seem to confirm that approach was used in finalizing Boeing’s deal with the Air Force to create the F-47. And he said this will allow rapid software-based upgrades that aren’t reliant on the original contractor.

“The upgrades can come at the speed of software, not hardware. [Upgrades] can come at the speed of our engineers understanding how fast to advance, versus dealing with the contractor and paying the extra cost,” Allvin said.

Future technology upgrades will also be more easily added to the service’s nascent collaborative combat aircraft, the YFQ-42 and YFQ-44, which are being designed by General Atomics and Anduril Industries, Allvin said.

“They’re all going to be under the same mission systems architecture,” Allvin said. “So we won’t just be upgrading one platform, we’ll be upgrading a system, and so the American taxpayer will get more combat capability out of their money.”

Allvin also said the service was learning from the F-35 program’s mistakes on the F-47.

“We’re going to have some conversations about F-35 and how we don’t want to repeat that,” he said.