Frank Kendall: And the Air Force wrote requirements for an aircraft that is essentially an F 22 replacement. And for the last few years, that's what we've been working on. We're now at the point where we commit to going forward to finish design and go into production of that or not. And this is really the most important milestone for almost any program. And two things made us rethink the that that that platform. One was budgets. You know, under the current budget levels that we have. Um, it was very, very difficult to see how we could possibly afford that platform that we needed another 20 plus billion dollars for R&D. And then we had to start buying airplanes at a cost of multiples of an F-35 that we were never going to afford more than in small numbers.
Frank Kendall: So it got on the table because of that. And then the operators in the Air Force senior operators came in and said, you know, now that we think about this aircraft, we're not sure it's the right, right, right design concept. Is this what we're really going to need? So we spent 3 or 4 months doing analysis, bringing in a lot of prior chiefs of staff and people that had known earlier in my career who I have a lot of respect for, to try to figure out what the right thing to do was at the end of the day. The consensus of that group was largely that there is value in going ahead with this, and there's some industrial base reasons to go ahead. But there are other priorities that we really need to fund first. So this decision ultimately depends upon two judgments. One is about is there enough money in the budget to buy all the other things we need? And NGAD and is NGAD the right thing to buy? Um, the alternatives to the F-22 replacement concept include something that looks more like an F-35, follow on similar, something that's much less expensive, something that's a multi-role aircraft, multirole aircraft that is designed to be a manager of CCAs and designed more for that for that role. And then there was another option we thought about, which is reliance more on long range strike.
Frank Kendall: That's something we could do in any event. So that's sort of on the table period. As an option. It's relatively inexpensive and probably makes some sense to do more that way. Um, but but but the but to keep the industrial base going to get the right concept, the right mix of capability into the Air Force. Um, and do it as efficiently as possible. I think there are a couple of really reasonable options on the table that the next administration is going to have to take a look at. Uh, people have talked about not doing another crewed aircraft. Um, I don't think we're quite there yet. I think that could be considered. Uh, we could just continue to rely on F-35 and keep it going. And for the foreseeable future and focus on CCAs. I'm not quite ready to do that personally, but the next administration could take a look at that. A very prominent industrialist has made a comment about that. Um, you all know what I'm talking about. Uh, the, uh, the the the the culture and the history and the legacy of the Air Force, which I've been steeped in for particularly for the last few years, but for my whole my whole life, really, uh, is about the role of the pilot and letting go to some degree of that, I think is an incredibly difficult emotional thing, emotional thing for people to do. So we'll all I'll, I'll be convincing from the outside and we'll all watch to see how this all plays out over the next few months.
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