The Pentagon will award its next-generation fighter jet contract to Boeing, a deal initially worth more than $20 billion, President Trump announced Friday alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
The Next Generation Air Dominance program, an F-47 fighter jet, will replace Lockheed Martin’s F-22 Raptor with an aircraft meant to fight alongside drones, Trump announced at the White House.
“The F-47 will be the most advanced, most capable, most lethal aircraft ever built,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “An experimental version of the plane has secretly been flying for almost five years, and we’re confident that it massively overpowers capabilities of any other nation.”
Boeing and Lockheed were competing for the engineering and manufacturing development phase of the contract for the sixth-generation fighter jet, a winner-take-all approach that grants the victor hundreds of billions of dollars over the program’s lifetime.
Designs from both companies for the aircraft were finalized last year.
The move is in line with the Pentagon’s new strategy focused on countering drones, or autonomous unmanned aircraft systems, which are set to dominate the battlefield in the years ahead, particularly when countering adversaries like China and Russia.
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