The original Century Series was intended to master the critical emerging technologies of its time: revolutionary improvements in hardware for jet propulsion and supersonic flight, which were central to the Cold War competition between nuclear-armed bombers and defending interceptors… The equivalent technologies today might be unmanned aircraft, man-machine teaming, and command-and-control networks to reorganize forces on the fly in real-time. Instead of using the Digital Century Series to marginally improve well-understood technologies for manned aircraft, it should pursue unmanned aircraft designs to master these new advancements.
It’s likely that all the aircraft in the Digital Century Series will share a common airframe, using modularity and containerization to enable easier and faster evolution between variants… Digital Century Series fighters will therefore be more specialized than their predecessors. That limits commanders’ options – unless the Air Force builds lots of different specialist aircraft, each optimized for a different mission.
That was Dan Patt and Bryan Clark, “The Air Force Digital Century Series is Stuck in the Wrong Century. I tend to agree with the authors of that article. Software, communication, autonomy, expendability, scalable manufacturing, single-mission plug-and-play variants of common design are the next frontier requiring the century series concept.
But I’m also unconvinced that airframing and propulsion technology has basically stopped advancing. Certainly new architectures unforeseen but arrived at through rapid prototyping of software and modularity will create new demands of the airframe and propulsion.
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