The Future of Air Combat: 6th Generation Fighter Jets of the 2030s

today's video is sponsored by ag1 from athletic greens more about them in a bit there's a saying in some Air Force circles which goes fight pilots make movies bomber pilots make history clearly this is in those circles which fly bombers and while this isn't 100 Fair as Fighters have been pivotal in many major air battles throughout aviation history there is some truth to the idea that Fighters are by far the preferred Hollywood fodder from the classic Battle of Britain to the modern Blockbuster and amazing movie Top Gun Mavericks Cinema goers have always been fascinated by the twisting rolling and stunningly far spectacles of Fighters jockeying for the kill shot as Generations apply to technology progress however it seems this form of aerial combat is rapidly going the same way as musket drills and broadsides the newest crop of planes flying today have not been designed with dogfighting in mind and future Fighters may lose both the need and the capacity to do it at all given this how would photos of TV to operate and well what will they look like well that does depend slightly on which development program we're talking about as there are a few different competing versions of what the future of air dominance will look like what all the major fighter blame producers of the world agree on however is the next generation of aircraft will redefine what aerial combat means and potentially end the era of the dogfight foreign in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War U.S military strategists reviewed their posture and discovered the worrying fact that two decades of jungle warfare encounter Insurgency had left them with a military which was unsuited to combat with their greatest existing threat the near peer the Soviet Union in military times appear or near peer adversary is one who can field roughly the equivalent amount of force with a near parity of technology and training to address this problem A New Concept was developed known as the air land sea concept this took advantage of Innovations in Communications technology to enable synchronization between platforms and units which were not designed to be synchronized like bombers and warships for example the air land sea concept got its first outing in Operation Desert Storm and it had a devastating effect as time moved on various countries around the world developed their own versions of air and C or alternately adopted a to a d meaning anti-access area denial this is a way of countering America's a rapid maneuver Warfare U.S military planners saw they needed New Concept if they were going to maintain their strategic Edge and this was the birth of multi-domain warfare which is basically an evolution of AirLand sea there are five domains of warfare air land sea subsurface as Sid blood to water and information the information domain includes psychological warfare signals and Communications as well as cyber warfare the multi-domain concept aims to make operations not just synchronized but simultaneous and potentially spontaneous fused across all five domains this concept is important as it has shaped the evolution of weapons and units within the US military for a couple of decades now and naturally this has also shaped those of U.S allies and his adversaries so today's video is brought to you by ag1 from from athletic greens ag-1 is the embodiment of athletic greens's mission to make giving your body the nutrition it needs simple and effortless 81 is your daily multivitamin multi-mineral pre and probiotic immunity support and more all in one scoop what you do you take a scoop from this container in the morning pop it into here with a little bit of water you shake it all up and you're good to go I tend to have it when I get to work with a cup of coffee and I feel it just gives me a bit of energy to get started with the day which is fantastic it delivers all the comprehensive daily nutrients that you need as well as helping to support long-term gut health my personal experience has 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plus Generations Sukhoi 35 or fa-18 block 3. now given how shaky the fifth generation tag arguably is there's an obvious issue with the idea of building another generation on top of that but proponents of the sixth generation idea say that it's really quite simple what defines this new generation is its unconventional systems and its relationship with information for many the fact that the vast majority of systems being imagined and prototyped right now are very far distant from the traditional idea of a fighter aircraft means that we're clearly looking at a new generation of warplanes set against this however is the fact that Russia's program has already fallen awkwardly into a sort of five plus plus categorization an indication that the sixth generation concept might also be just a little bit shaky now whatever the formal category issues there is absolutely no denying that the new Fighters being developed around the world are going to be revolutionary disrupters to air combat assuming that they look anything like their concept art and koi drip fed media announcements and look as far as programs around the world go they're all kind of remarkably similar so let's jump in and have a look at the broad range of proposed specifications for a sixth generation fighter craft so first up to the airplane itself traditionally Fighters they've been small extremely fast and highly Nimble with fifth generation Fighters like the f-30 five however this agility has already begun to be less of a priority with Over the Horizon sensors and long-range weapons taking the place of its dogfighting capability all the countries currently developing Sixth Gen Fighters agree that this process needs to be taken a whole step further the U.S Navy's fax program for example has released concept art of a carrier-born fighter without a tail representing a significant reduction in certain types of maneuverability the US Air Force's next Generation air dominance engad programmers modeled a fighter which might be the size of the B-21 Raider slightly smaller than jumbo jet improvements in design and simulation technology also mean that the classic shape of a stealth fighter might alter radically with digital testing and design allowing more radical sensor evading profiles without the need for stabilizers and flaps this means that the age of the catastrophically ugly f-117a Nighthawk is well and truly over there are also propositions for self-healing Hull vulnerable sections of fuselage would be underpinned by cavities filled with epoxy and other material so a whole breach would trigger an instant automatic patch allowing the aircraft to just shrug off minor damage very low observable technology or vbo is also ubiquitous in all the literature generated by sixth generation programs around the world this involves not only sensor evading Contours but also Innovative and highly classified radar absorbent materials that's kind of all we can tell you about those Weaponry is also undergoing a shift with larger yield and long-range missiles being prioritized especially given that there's a reduced need to keep the aircraft small additionally improvements in militarization and Energy Efficiency mean that higher power weapons can be carried by next-gen Fighters with long-range standoff air-to-air and ground attack missiles being developed for use by Fighters instead of bombers Hypersonic weapons engines could also be carried by larger Fighters there's also a lot of talk about directed energy weapons the real vaporware of combat Aviation however significant improvements in technology have made these somewhat feasible for the first time a recent Israeli tests or a Cessna light aircraft shoot down a small drone with a directed energy weapon meaning that finally a weapon system which has been breathlessly proposed since the release of Star Wars Episode 4 might finally come to fruition the aerial cycle propulsion systems are almost certainly also going to be a feature with some programs also emitting the option of a scramjet a variable cycle propulsion system is in very basic terms a jet engine array which can reuse its exhaust for creating combustion and thrust and which has an independent but connected engine for vertical takeoff and Landing there's also a responsive to power needs and the environment with adjustable internal geometry which allows for finely detailed adjustments in fuel burn through in-flight reconfiguration of the engine's internals scramjets are a sort of hybrid rocket and jet engine which uses airflow rather than tank oxygen to fuel combustion the successful test of a scramjet was conducted by the University of Queensland in Australia in 2002 reaching a speed of Mach 7. now both of these engine types are significantly more fuel efficient meaning longer range and lower environmental impact which is a nice bonus but probably the most unique features of the sixth generation Jets being proposed around the world have to do with information technology every program is looking at optional Manning at the very least which means that the aircraft can be flown either manned around it's rumors that the Russian next-gen program is looking seriously at just a fully unmanned fighter jet and unmanned training or mum tea is also a feature of every single sixth generation proposal and what this means is that instead of just building a single aircraft each fighter would come with complementary unmanned aircraft these might might drone swarms more complex fighter-sized systems like the loyal wingman or a combination of both this means that there will need to be a revolution in the sensor and data sharing arrays that Fighters are going to be fitted with the present a fifth generation fighter can share information with other aircraft at the same type basically between identical system Frameworks the Sig generation fighter is going to have to have systems which are fully integrated with space and ground-based systems allowing for secure network information sharing and potentially remote control and decision making assistance what's being envisioned here is the very first cloud-based AI assisted bully shared battle space picture allowing fighter pilots to take a more fluid intermediate role in multi-domain Warfare as well as acting as a commander control node for a diverse range of platforms both manned and unmanned the implications of this are potentially revolutionary not just for air combat but for the whole of warfare in general highly specialized high value units like fighting Jets have long been a significant resource drain for formations in combat with huge amounts of Manpower and Technology being required to sustain a single warplane for a very limited number of strikes with mum tea however each fighter unit could be Force multiplied such that a single aircraft could be a self-contained automated equivalent of what today is a huge array of sensors ground teams and warplanes one Congressional report breathlessly speculated the 1 6th gen fighter could replace an entire present-day Squadron and while this is almost certainly hyperbole it's also not entirely false also persistent within the literature of Western governments and their allies is the idea of cyber capabilities these are obviously very highly classified and all parties involved have been extremely tight-lipped about what this would actually look like but can take it as a given however that some kind of integrated defense from Cyber attack potentially involving third-party units is highly likely to be included and when it comes to offensive cyber governments tend to be even more secretive but suffice to say that there are some capabilities which it would be feasible to fit in a enough however much of this actually manifests in reality one thing is for absolutely certain the old vision of a Sleek nimble fighter aircraft dog fighting in visual contact with the enemy is dead and it is gone every single aspect of every single program points to a very different kind of warplane the fighter of the near future will probably be a large fast and long-range aircraft carrying a formidable arsenal of standoff weapons it will be fully networked across all five domains and will likely be accompanied by a swarm of unmanned aircraft all its systems will make heavy use of AI to identify and prioritize targets assisting operators and overall command with decision making by rapidly providing option sets rather than just Raw Battle space data and its primary function will be to sit well over the horizon out of sight and just lob long-range weapons of the enemy before it's even detected [Music] at the moment the only sixth generation aircraft in existence is the B-21 Raider a long-range bomber which only exists as two unmanned aircraft one for ground testing and the other for flight testing if you'd like to know more about the B21 Raider you can absolutely check out our video all about if it's on this channel now apart from the radar Which is far from finished there are no 6th generation aircraft either on the ground or in the sky both the US and Japan have announced test flights for their sixth generation programs but so little is known about these that it's actually impossible for Aviation experts to say what if anything was actually put in the air as of the beginning of 2023 right now most of the major developed nations of the world are developing sixth generation fighters in terms of the programs from China and India these are so nascent as to have almost no information associated with them China announced the commencement of preliminary research in 2019 and India isn't scheduled over its first sixth generation fighter out until 2029 having said that India has already announced its intentions to create quote Niche 6th generation capabilities and we could speculate that this may have something to do with its role in the quad alliance between Australia India Japan and the USA otherwise as many observers have noted India lacks the organic technical expertise and Industrial base to produce sixth generation technology so it's difficult to imagine them developing anything outside of the framework of the Quad Russia's program was announced in 2013 but has been described as a five plus plus or sixth generation program which means that it may not be aiming to produce a purely Sixth Gen Fighter the two main pillars of this program from what we know are the development of an unmanned fighter aircraft as well as an Interceptor to replace the mig-31 Insiders and analysts have said that this program is likely going to suffer from a lack of prioritization for as long as the Sukhoi 57 fifth generation fighter is still in development France Germany and Spain are developing the future combat air system a program which includes drones and a sixth generation fighter to replace the Raphael typhoon and ef-18 Hornet respectively and finally a Consortium consisting of Japan the UK Italy and Sweden are working on a combined program based in part upon Advanced Sixth Gen fighter development completed by Japan called the global combat air program the EU and Japan UK programs are likely to be heavily intermingled with the USA's development while the US is understandably cagey about sharing its Advanced weapons and avionic systems the fact that all these planes will likely need to interoperate means that there's a strong chance they'll end up with broadly similar aircraft as evidenced by the current bit gen Fighters the programs run by U.S adversaries Russia and China are either not pure sick gen fighter programs or up so young as yet to have very little about them broadly speaking however all these programs are expecting to have their new fighters in the air by the 2030s with China being notionally the last Off the Mark with a target of entering full-scale production by 2035. of course the most telling Factor isn't these announcements but how far each program is from its start point and so far the USA's two Sixth Gen programs are leading with production expected to commence by 2030. significant improvements in digital design technology have also made the development of U.S warplane significantly more rapid the B-21 Raider took a mere seven years from contract being awarded to the production of the first aircraft a process which ordinarily takes decades as we mentioned earlier the ngad program's first test whether it was an x-frame a simulation or an actual flight took only a year to get to and whatever it might have been this time frame would have been impossibly short just a few years ago what this means is that there's actually a high probability that we'll see the unveiling of the first Sixth Gen Fighter by the schedule 2030 Day Tour maybe even earlier the U.S air force is also undergoing a radical change in the way it procures and sustains high-end fighter aircraft for the past few decades a sort of eggs in one basket approach has been pursued with the Air Force syncing all of its result forces into a single fighter sustaining it until about halfway through its operational life and then rinsing and repeating this approach has been hugely expensive sustainment costs increased significantly as warplanes age and has also seen the USA's industrial base shrink significantly since the 60s when this approach began where there used to be 10 companies capable of creating high-end Fighters there are now only three Boeing Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman this has created a situation where contracts for new aircraft are essentially an existential struggle between the only three players in the field massive sunk costs are associated with winning each bid as the long development and production timelines mean that each contract only becomes profitable late in life as well as this the relative lack of competition can lead to poorer outcomes for the customer in this case the US Military and its allies as procurement model this basically guaranteed there'd be no more than two main fight types distributed in what's known as a high low configuration what this means is that there would be b a smaller number of one kind of warplane and a much higher number of the other each with slightly different Mission capabilities and a large degree of overlap This is highly vulnerable however to delays and problems the most recent example being the sizeable shortfall in F22 production the aircraft which was meant to be the high to the f-35's low the U.S Air Force recently announced that it was no longer going to pursue vigil current in this way instead of one bid for one fighter every 30 or 40 years with the resultant problems and development timeline measured in decades the angad program is keeping its options very much open this means that multiple companies can pitch multiple airframes as well as a greater variety of unmanned aircraft and weapons and sensor systems with a reasonable expectation of being asked to develop them beyond all the hype and sci-fi fantasy elements of the various 6th generation fighter announcements there exists a core of Truth which even shorn of all the usual media sensationalism and Industry hyperbole is truly awesome the most sober and conservative estimate of just how much of what's being talked about will actually be made still represents a mind-boggling revolution in warplane technology at this point we normally say something about looking forward to seeing these amazing aircrafts screaming through the sky sometime soon but that's not what the future probably looks like it's more likely that in the near future we won't see these supersonic dealers of distant death at all world doesn't know they're somewhere Over the Horizon and more importantly so will our adversaries thank you

Channel: Megaprojects

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Id: qs8STd7QAv8

Length: 20min 20sec (1220 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 25 2023