As Air Force mulls next-gen fighter, tanker plans hang in the balance

The U.S. Air Force’s next-generation tanker was once envisioned as a stealthy, penetrating refueling platform. But that idea is changing, experts and industry sources say, amid competing budget priorities and evolving concepts of how the service will achieve air dominance in the future. 

Officially, plans for the Next-Generation Aerial Refueling System, or NGAS, still call for a clean-sheet tanker design, more survivable than the service’s current Boeing KC-46 and KC-135 tankers. While Air Force officials are adamant that another tanker needs to be developed, how the service will pay for it remains to be seen. 

“I haven't heard anybody recently tell me that they think that's remotely achievable within the timeframe and the budget,” one industry executive said, regarding NGAS.

Moreover, the size and role of the future tanker hinges on the Air Force’s sixth-generation fighter jet program, called Next Generation Air Dominance, which is on hold until the service figures out if it has the right design. 

The NGAD program is moving away from pursuing a penetrating, counter-air fighter, and is becoming a family of systems where drones conduct most of the close-in work—meaning the need for a stealthy tanker to refuel close to the fight is reduced as well, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. 

“This whole idea of operating really close to enemy territory with fighters and tankers is starting to just not be practical or feasible anymore. And that's why the NGAD program's evolving, I think, NGAS will also evolve to deprioritize stealth and low observability,” Clark said. 

The service aims to answer some of these fundamental questions about its future tanker through an analysis of alternatives, which will wrap up by the end of the year, according to an Air Force spokesperson. The analysis is considering a “range of options for NGAS,” the results of which will be ready to inform the service’s fiscal 2026 budget request, service officials told reporters in July. 

For both NGAD and NGAS, the service is trying to measure before cutting, as threats and previous assumptions about air superiority have changed, said J.J. Gertler, a military analyst at the Teal Group.

“The entire shape of the next tanker is going to depend on the shape of NGAD, and until we get the first answer, we won't even be able to say what the second answer starts to look like or who's going to be competitive,” Gertler said.

While the Air Force mulls what NGAS should look like, industry has already started devising plans for a next-gen tanker competition. Start-up JetZero is working with Northrop Grumman to develop a blended-wing body prototype tanker and received money from the Air Force to build and test a demonstrator, with plans for first flight in 2027. A blended-wing aircraft can operate for longer distances and can be more fuel-efficient than traditional airframes. Lockheed also released a new design for NGAS earlier this year—featuring lambda-style wings—and has been spending its own money to develop it. It's still unclear what plans Boeing has for NGAS; the company is still pitching its KC-46 tankers.

In the meantime, the Air Force still needs to buy more tankers to provide aerial refueling services until NGAS comes online—at least 75 more—but hasn’t definitively said what it will do for this “bridge” tanker buy. At one point, service officials wanted to hold a competition for the next buy, but that aspiration is looking highly unlikely after the service’s top weapons buyer said they’d probably just buy more KC-46s to fill the requirement, and Lockheed dropped out of its partnership with Airbus to develop a new offering.  

No decisions have been made about the bridge purchase, Kevin Stamey, Air Force program executive officer for mobility and training aircraft, told reporters in July. There are still “corporate decisions” to make so the service can finalize the “intertwined strategies” of NGAS and the bridge tanker buy, Stamey said.  

The absence of a bridge tanker competition suggests that the Air Force will never get NGAS off the ground, said JV Venable, a senior resident fellow for airpower studies at the Mitchell Institute. 

“I would say that the strategy for NGAS is a ruse, and you back that up by the Air Force's track record on every one of its other programs, including NGAD, and when we get to the end of the time when KC-46 production is supposed to go away, they'll just extend it,” Venable said. 

Service officials say the uncertainty surrounding next-gen aircraft programs is partly due to tight budgets and competing priorities. The Air Force is finalizing its 2026 budget, which officials have said will be even tighter than 2025 since non-aircraft programs, like the Sentinel ICBM replacement, are costing far more than initially projected. The service asked for $8 million for NGAS activities in its fiscal 2024 budget, with no additional funds in its fiscal 2025 request. 

Clark said there’s simply no room in the budget for an expensive, low-observable new tanker program. The Air Force might be able to begin buying NGAS at the end of the KC-46 buy if it’s not dramatically more expensive than the Boeing tanker, he said, but it would require the Air Force to set aside some money in the near term to fund NGAS development.

In the next two to three years, the Air Force should continue to study options for NGAS, foster design work from promising companies, and, most importantly, spend money to develop the aerial-refueling mission systems of the future, said Tim Walton, a senior fellow at Hudson. 

“Regardless of what design the Air Force might go with on NGAS, or even if it doesn't do NGAS, the Air Force needs to spend a lot of money on communications, command and control and decision support tools and active self-defenses for current tankers. All of those technologies could be incorporated on the current programs…but then they also lay the groundwork for NGAS,” Walton said.  

He said the service should also invest in new fuel transfer systems that could be put onto commercial aircraft, and have those aircraft serve as a latent war reserve, “so that if you're in a protracted conflict, as your frontline tankers are being attrited, you can have a growing proportion of your rear area refueling operation to be supported by commercial aircraft under which you could incorporate some of these fuel transfer systems.”  

The Air Force has put some money toward developing refueling pods that could turn other aircraft, like jets or drones, into small tankers to give the service more refueling capacity. The Navy is also developing its own unmanned tanker, the MQ-25 Stingray, which is designed to provide fuel through the probe-and-drogue refueling method. With new emerging technology, the Air Force will likely experiment with more autonomous refueling to supplement its current tanking capabilities and inform future decisions. 

Officials may provide more details about their tanker plans and how the service is rethinking future aircraft programs at the Air Force Association’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference next week in National Harbor, Maryland.