The Sixth-Generation Fighter: How Does its Progress Stand in 2024?

Every now and then I turn my attention back to the matter of the sixth-generation fighter I first took up in 2010. Back then all I could reasonably discuss was background (explaining the system of "generations"), the desiderata that were being discussed for the next generation of fighters (hypersonic and near space-flying, AI-piloted, intercontinental-range aircraft that change shape in flight and blast the enemy with directed-energy weapons), and my thoughts as to the likelihood of such aircraft being realized in anything like the time frame being discussed.

At the time I expected that the twenty-first century would be an era of slow technological progress (certainly in the more relevant areas), making the Wunderwaffen of which the sixth-generation theorists dreamed implausible, while contributing to the slow economic growth that was going to make such aircraft unaffordable even were they to prove technically feasible. (Think fighters costing a billion dollars or more each in a time of unending austerity.) I also thought such aircraft, even if feasible and affordable, as likely to be remote from the actual needs of the major militaries in an era of muted great power conflict and "small wars."

Revisiting the issue a few years ago it seemed to me that I had been right--mostly. It has indeed been an era of slow technological progress, and weak economic growth, such that the wonder-planes people talked about circa 2010 simply were not going to happen by 2030--let alone prove affordable in any meaningful quantity. But great power conflict resurged in a big way, and in the process led to intensified interest internationally in a new generation of combat aircraft.

So where did that leave things? Between the desire for new aircraft--and the fact of slow technical progress and strained means--it seemed that there was a considerable lowering of the bar where expectations of the new aircraft were concerned. Rather than, for example, hypersonic jets they were thinking Mach 2 aircraft (with the same top speed fighters have had since the 1950s) which merely launch hypersonic missiles.

One of the more interesting developments was a turn by the U.S. Air Force back to the approach it took with its second-generation fighters--the famed "Century" series where it pursued a rapid development of a next-generation fighter it bought in some quantity, followed by another, more advanced fighter it bought in its turn using the lessons learned from the last, and so on (going from the F-100 Super Sabre to the F-106 Delta Dart in not much more than a half decade), in contrast with its later approaches (the long development, production, employment of the third-generation F-4, fourth-generation F-15 and F-16, and so on).

The reuse of the strategy pursued in the development of the second-generation planes had many critics from the start, put off by the poor image many of its aircraft have had, while being unconvinced by the buzzword-heavy arguments made for advances in digital design techniques permitting the rapid design of aircraft to be procured in small batches to be cost-effective. Still, for all the misgivings some had, it did seem the program was going ahead, the more in as in late 2020 the public was told that an actual sixth-generation jet had flown (even if no source I know of reported any more than that).

Since then, however, the Air Force seems to have shifted back toward its more conventional acquisitions process--but otherwise things remain as they appeared in 2020, no fundamental breakthrough suggesting the imminent appearance of those super-fighters that had people talking in 2010, or for that matter, any great public disclosure making it much clearer what the next-generation jet really will look like when all is said and done.