Makes you wonder what's going on in the black program world......
https://www.flightglobal.com/news/ar...-f-22s-422950/
".........The service’s deputy chief of staff for strategic plans and requirements said as much during a congressional hearing on 8 March, suggesting that fighter jet manufacturers like Boeing, Northrop Grumman or Lockheed Martin may decide to offer modifications to existing technologies and platforms in the next F-X competition.
“Because we want to do it faster and don’t want to do another 20-year development programme for a whole host of reasons, we’ll try and go with technology that are at a high readiness level now with manufacturing capabilities that are at a high readiness level now,” Lt Gen James Holmes tells a Senate Armed Services subcommittee panel in response to questions about restarting F-22 production. “I think it’s completely possible as we get the requirements that there may be competitors that bid on modification of an existing technology or platform like the F-22 and the F-35.”............
Holmes says pressing forward with the air force’s Next-Generation Air Dominance programme is the better way to make up for lower-than-planned fifth-generation fighter capacity, but cannot be a technologically exotic fighter jet that takes two or three decades to develop.
“They cost too much, they take too long, they make you drive for technology that’s so far into the future that it’s really hard to achieve and by the time you spend 30 years achieving it, it may not be exactly what you want,” he explains after the hearing. “We’re trying to move to a world where we go forward with new airplanes that take advantage of technology that’s ready to manufacture and we have the manufacturing skills to do it, and what could we produce in five years or 10 years instead of 30 years?
"It’s purely speculation on my part, but if I was going to ask a company to bid on what they could build for me in five years or 10 years, I’d expect that some of them would take advantage of work they’ve already done and base it on something they already have.”.......