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When Computers Went To Sea | NGAD 프로그램의 진행여부는 올해 말 판가름날 것 - Daum 카페
10월 말만 해도 올해 말까지는 결정한다고 했었는데, 결국 트럼프 행정부로 결정을 미루네요.
트럼프 정부에서 국방부 장관으로 지명된 폭스뉴스 진행자 Pete Hegseth가 공군참모총장을 거쳐 합동참모의장으로 임명되고 임기가 아직 남아있는 C.Q.Brown 대장을 위시한 다양성, 형평성 및 포용성 정책 지지하는 기존 장군들을 자르겠다고 공언했었는데 그 때문일 수도 있겠네요.
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/air-force-defers-ngad-decision-trump-administration
A Boeing artist's concept of a Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) fighter. Mike Tsukamoto/staff; Boeing
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Air Force Defers Decision on NGAD to New Trump Administration
Dec. 5, 2024
The Air Force is deferring decisions on the Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter to the incoming Trump administration, opting to continue both its review of the program and the Technology Maturation and Risk Reduction contracts during the transition period, the service announced Dec. 5.
“The Secretary of the Air Force will defer the Next Generation Air Dominance way ahead decision to the next administration, while the Department of the Air Force continues its analysis and executes the necessary actions to ensure decision space remains intact for the NGAD program,” the service said in a press release.
The Air Force further said it is extending the current contracts for NGAD to “further mature designs/systems while ensuring the industry teams remain intact.” The service is also asking the industry competitors “to update their proposals to account for the delays resulting from the current pause (schedule/milestone update only).”
Boeing and Lockheed, each of which build fighters for the Air Force today, are the presumed competitors for NGAD. Northrop Grumman chief executive Kathy Warden previously revealed her company had declined to bid on the program, but would likely pursue the Navy’s next-gen fighter. Northrop is among those with contracts to develop engine/vehicle interfaces for NGAD, along with Boeing, Lockheed, GE Aerospace and RTX’s Pratt & Whitney.
Officials had previously said they planned to award an engineering and manufacturing development contract or contracts for NGAD—it’s not clear if there would be one or two—this fall. However, over the summer, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall ordered a “pause” on the program, saying the Air Force was no longer certain that the requirements set for it matched the evolving threat. He also acknowledged the price tag for NGAD—Kendall has said it would be “multiple hundreds of millions” of dollars per tail—was prohibitively high without more resources.
Kendall ordered an internal review of the program and formed a blue-ribbon panel of former Air Force leaders with unique knowledge of stealth projects to provide advice. No end date for the review was set, although senior service leaders suggested it would be finished before the Air Force’s fiscal 2026 budget proposal went to the Office of Management and Budget.
The NGAD is the centerpiece of the Air Force’s plans for achieving air superiority in the future and is one of Kendall’s seven “operational imperatives”; the capability development efforts considered most crucial to the service’s ability to credibly deter or defeat a peer adversary.
At AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber conference in September, Kendall said he thought the central, crewed platform in the NGAD family of systems could—with new technologies and a revised operating concept—be acquired for the same cost as an F-35, the last price for which was around $80 million a copy for the Air Force variant.
An Air Force spokesperson said that in updating their proposals, the contractors will not be amending their technical concepts, but simply adjusting their cost estimates, taking into account delays accruing from the “pause,” which was ordered in July. She also said there is sufficient money in the program to accommodate the extension without further budgetary action.
The spokesperson said she could not reveal the number of participating contractors, the value of the TMRR contracts, or the expected duration of the extension. The program remains largely classified.
The spokesperson also said the Air Force is not planning to separate the budgets for the NGAD fighter and Collaborative Combat Aircraft, which are in the same developmental program element. Both have their own discrete line items within the program element and separating them is not necessary, she said. The CCA represents much of the “family of systems” that comprise the overall NGAD program.
The Air Force’s fiscal 2025 budget request for NGAD was $2.75 billion, and its forecast called for spending nearly $28.5 billion on it through the end of the decade, a figure including the CCA effort. For NGAD alone, the five-year plan calls for $19.6 billion in funding. The Air Force said in the ’25 budget that its ’26 request would be around $3.2 billion for NGAD alone.
From firing generals to limiting women in combat, Hegseth hints at possible Pentagon shakeup"Any general that was involved ... in any of the DEI woke shit has got to go," Trump's pick for SecDef said in a recent podcast.
By Ashley Roqueon November 13, 2024 at 3:25 PM
Pete Hegseth hosts FOX News Channel’s “Fox & Friends” All-American Summer Concert Series outside Fox News Channel Studios on May 31, 2019 in New York City. (Photo by Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — “Going sideways” is how Fox News host and National Guard veteran Pete Hegseth, announced last night as President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for Secretary of Defense, recently dubbed the state of the Pentagon.
The pick of Hegseth, who lacks extensive experience in the defense or foreign policy sector, caught many off guard, prompting a slew of questions about how he might approach the job overseeing the military and its over $800 billion budget.
While a host of questions remain, Hegseth recently filmed an episode of the Shawn Ryan Show that dropped just five days ago. There, while promoting his new book, “The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free,” he offered a peek at possible priorities in the Pentagon’s top civilian post.
Here are five key takeaways, in the prospective Pentagon chief’s own words.
Firing Top Generals Over ‘Woke Shit’
One of Hegseth’s chief bones of contention, spread throughout the interview and seemingly the focus of his book, revolves around military “woke shit” like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. One solution? A firing spree that starts with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force Gen. CQ Brown, who still has three years remaining in his term.
“First of all, you got to fire the chairman [of the] Joint Chiefs, and…obviously you’re going to bring in a new Secretary of Defense. But, any general that was involved – general, admiral, whatever –… in any of the DEI woke shit has got to go,” he said. “Either you’re in for warfighting, and that’s it, that’s the only litmus test we care about.”
“You gotta get rid of DEI and CRT [critical race theory] out of military academies,” Hegseth added. “You’re not training young officers to be baptized in this type of thinking.”
Notably, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that the Trump administration is considering creating a board that would fire a number of three- and four-star general officers viewed as too invested in DEI issues, while both Politico and the Washington Post have raised the possibility that Brown would be removed from his position as America’s top uniformed officer.
Women In Combat? It’s Complicated
When asked if he liked women in combat, Hegseth quickly said “No.” However, his position appeared to become more nuanced as the interview went on. Women pilots? They have his support. But women in more “labor intensive” jobs, they do not.
RecommendedNGAD’s fate in Trump’s hands as Air Force punts decision to next administration
The service has asked industry to update their proposals for the stealth fighter to account for the pause.
“I love women service members who contribute amazingly,” Hegseth said. “Because everything about men and women serving together makes the situation more complicated, and complication in combat means casualties are worse.
“SEALs, Rangers, Green Berets, you know, MARSOC [Marine Forces Special Operations], infantry battalions, armor, artillery … I’m talking about something [where] strength is a differentiator,” he later added. “Pilots? Give me a female pilot all day long. I got no issues with that.”
Women have only been allowed to serve in all military capacities since the start of 2016. However, they are required to pass the same physical requirement as their counterparts.
More broadly, Hegseth hit at the idea that the military has moved too far away from its traditional recruitment base.
“There aren’t enough lesbians in San Francisco to man the 82nd airborne,” he said. “And in trying to cater to that, they lost the boys from Tennessee and Kentucky and Oklahoma, the traditional dudes who did it because they wanted, they loved their country, or they wanted the adventure, or they, you know, wanted to try tough things, or they need an up and out of their community, whatever it is they’re like, if I want to do the woke crap, I could go to the local community college or local college.”
Bring Back The Confederate Names
In 2023, the Pentagon renamed nine bases that had been honoring Confederate generals. On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to switch all the names back, and Hegseth is seemingly onboard with that plan, calling it a mistake of former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley.
“Suddenly, after George Floyd…after defund the police, it became faddish to insinuate that the military ranks are infected with racists, that it’s all these white nationalists under the radar, the tattoos just waiting to pop up, and ultimately, on the recruiting side, what you’ve done is you Bud Lighted yourself.”
Switching the names back may not be that easy, however, as Congress may weigh in.
When To Use The Military
For the past six years, Hegseth said, he has been a “recovering” neoconservative who now looks down on the “foolishness” of US military interventions around the globe. In almost every case, he asserted, they have “created something worse.”
In retrospect, he added, that laundry list includes two spots he served in — Iraq and Afghanistan. And while Hegseth didn’t use the podcast to broadcast just how he would reshape military operations around the globe, it won’t be advising on counterinsurgency operations.
“The hubris of the Pentagon is that they want to now tell other countries how to do counterinsurgency based on what we did in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said. “Are you kidding me? So you really have learned nothing.”
And any notion of sending US troops to Ukraine, would be a hard pass for him.
“The trust there that our political leaders or our generals would have our best interest of mind, is totally broken. Totally broken,” Hegseth said. “I acknowledge that completely, and the last thing I want is my son deploying to the Donbas to defend eastern Ukraine.”
Ukraine And Putin
When discussing the war in Ukraine — which Hegseth described as “Putin’s give me my shit back war” — he expressed skepticism about the idea that supporting Kyiv is needed to keep Russia from moving into NATO territory.
“I’ve friends who would probably agree with us on most things. They’re like, well, if you don’t stop them in Ukraine, then he’s going to go all the way to Poland,” Hegseth said. “I don’t think he’s — I mean, maybe in a perfect world where he had unlimited capabilities and he could crown himself King of Europe, he would [invade elsewhere.] I think he probably knows enough to know that is probably not going much further in Ukraine. And I don’t think he’s a suicidal maniac who’s hell bent on bringing an Armageddon through nuclear warfare.”
“So if Ukraine could… defend themselves from that great but I don’t want American intervention driving deep into Europe and making [Putin] feel like he’s so much on his heels that then he does have to, because early on, he was talking about nukes.”
However, his views on Ukraine may be more nuanced than the interview shows. According to the Kyiv Post, Hegseth in the past has criticized the Biden administration for being slow to arm Ukraine, and in 2022 described Putin as a “war criminal.”
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첫댓글 1974년에 나온 미국공군 문서는 나중에 F-15를 만들게 되는 F-X 사업이 처음에는 60,000 파운드 넘고 최대 속도는 마하 2.7 나오지만 추력대중량비는 0.75인 F-111 닯은 뚱뚱보를 내놨다가 나중에 확 바뀌어 F-15가 되었다고 하는데 NGAD도 과연 그렇게 될 것인지 궁금하네요.
머스크가 F-35 칼질하겠다고 호언장담하고 있는데 이쪽과도 엮일 가능성이 있겠네요.