The future of the Air Domain at the advent of the Sixth Generation

The pervasive renewal of multi-layered strategic competition on global, regional and local scales, and the parallel re-emergence of the relative end of high-intensity conventional conflict as an immanent possibility, has promoted a widespread doctrinal, organizational and capacitive overhaul of, among others, the air military instrument, in order to maintain superiority in the third dimension. Indeed, the proliferation and refinement of increasingly integrated surface-to-air sensors and effectors capable of contesting or denying air dominance, imposing constant attrition on adversary air forces and going so far as to generate access-limiting bubbles (A2/AD – Anti-Access/Area-Denial), combined with significant cross-fleet modernization programs of peer and near-peer competitors poses fundamental challenges for the near future of air dominance. Conventional hostilities fought over the past fifty years, from the Six-Day War to the current conflict between the Russian Federation and Ukraine, indicate in parallel the strategic, operational, and tactical importance of the air military tool, highlighting the deleterious effects of a failure to achieve dominance of the skies: disarticulation of operational tempo, manoeuvre attrition, campaign stagnation, and exponential increase in casualties.

Based on this historical-doctrinal awareness and considering the profound transformation of the air battlefield and the gradual obsolescence of air superiority fighter fleets, many Air Forces, especially Western ones, have inaugurated development programs to equip themselves with up-to-date aircrafts capable of performing at their best in air-to-air combat, surviving in the increasingly lethal third dimension, and penetrating multilevel air defence systems. This new, sixth generation of fighters aims to introduce considerable technological innovations that are set to radically transform the use of the air instrument and potentially decisively tilt the balance of power in military competition. This Focus Report intends to first illustrate the elements that differentiate the previous five and a half generations (including the so-called 4.5 generation, or “half-generation”) from one another, proceeding then to analyse the technical and doctrinal trends common to the fighters still under development, and then to expose the characteristics of the main element of innovation in the operational concept underlying the creation of the aircraft, namely the use of gregarious drones in a system of systems. Finally, the status of the major sixth-generation aircraft development programmes will be outlined, with a specific focus on the U.S. Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD), the international Anglo-Italian-Japanese Global Combat Air Program (GCAP), and the Franco-German-Spanish Future Combat Air System (FCAS) project.