Debrief: Generational Change—USAF Adjusts Fighter Generation Thinking
For more than three decades, the combat aircraft community has classified fighter development into generations.
Readers will be familiar with how fighters have been cataloged by their capabilities, whether they were supersonic, had a radar and or could perform multiple missions, and so on.
Today, this approach has also become a marketing tool. Lockheed Martin was arguably the first to use it as such, labeling its F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and F-22 Raptor as the only fifth-generation platforms available. Their low-observable capabilities, advanced avionics and sensor fusion distinguished them from competitors such as the
F-15 and F/A-18 Super Hornet, Dassault Rafale, Eurofighter Typhoon and Saab Gripen. Other companies have since adopted that approach. And the terms have been widely used by senior officers, politicians, analyst and journalists as a convenient means of defining how combat aircraft have evolved.
Some in industry have long contended that these definitions were disingenuous, even as they were guilty of using them themselves.
Now it seems the U.S. Air Force wants to put this generational lexicon out to pasture. According to senior planners speaking at the International Fighter Conference here, the service is discussing whether the nomenclature should continue to be used.
“We are having an internal discussion about that nomenclature not really being useful to us anymore relative to the capabilities that exist out there,” said the officer, who cannot be identified because of a Chatham House rule imposed on the discussions at the event.
Technology and more advanced weapons increasingly “challenge the notion of the fourth-, fifth- and sixth-generation capabilities,” he said. “There is an argument to be made that the advances in those technologies, coupled with advanced weapons and the ranges that they bring ... elevate some of those [aircraft] that would have traditionally been considered fourth-generation platforms to something more akin to a fifth-generation capability.”
They pointed to the example of newly upgraded
F-15Es fitted with the Eagle Passive Active Warning Survivability System (Epawss), which had become somewhat comparable, at least in some scenarios, to the F-35.
“We are certainly not making the case that an F-15 will do all the things that an F-35 can do, but we do think that it is a little bit misleading to refer to that [F-15] as a fourth-generation platform,” the officer said.
The change in lexicon would help inform decisions on combat capability and could prompt more modernization versus acquiring brand-new aircraft, he appeared to hint.
Part of the move, the officer suggested, was influenced by a need to evolve how combat capability was reported to decision-makers. The service is proposing a legislative change in which the service would report its “combat-capable total aircraft inventory” as opposed to its “primary mission aircraft inventory.”
He said the change would “paint a more accurate picture” of the aircraft available to generate combat airpower and the Air Force’s surge capacity.
