President Donald Trump announced Friday that Boeing had won a massive, $20 billion contract for the Air Force’s next-generation fighter jet — directly challenging China’s military advances in the Pacific.
The plane represents a leap ahead in stealth technologies and is designed to partner with a new fleet of drones, giving it more combat punch and surveillance capabilities to evade radars as it flies through contested airspace.
“This is next level,” Trump said in an Oval Office announcement with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth standing behind him. “Level five is good — this is level six.”
The announcement came less than an hour after Elon Musk visited the Pentagon to meet with Hegseth about China’s threat to the United States. Musk has been a longtime opponent of the Pentagon building crewed fighter planes, like the one described Friday.
The Trump adviser, in social media posts late last year, touted videos of drone swarms while criticizing crewed fighter jets. “Some idiots are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35,” he posted to his X account.
The next-generation fighter program was also not on the list of Pentagon weapons systems exempted from possible cuts in a February memo that Hegseth circulated.
With this choice, the Trump administration is opting to split the difference between the current era of crewed fighter jets and drones enabled by artificial intelligence. The Next Generation Air Dominance program, a crewed aircraft, is being designed to operate alongside a new family of combat drones.
“This plane flies with drones,” Trump said. “That’s something no other plane can do.”
The decision to go with Boeing is a reversal for the president, who has been openly critical of the defense contractor. And it’s a major coup for the company after it was eliminated early in the process for an uncrewed fighter jet program.
Boeing also is struggling with a new Air Force One program, the official presidential aircraft that Trump has sought to redesign.
“I’m not happy with Boeing, he told reporters last month. “I’m not happy with the fact that it’s taking so long. And we may do something else. We may go out and buy a plane or get a plane or something.”
But top Republicans on Capitol Hill celebrated the decision Friday and encouraged Trump to move ahead with broader defense building.
“The NGAD/F-47 is a vital platform that would allow the United States to rule the skies for years to come,” Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) said in a statement, adding he looked forward to “a broad revitalization of the defense industrial base.”
The Air Force is working with drone maker General Atomics and tech startup Anduril to build prototypes for the program. One of the companies will eventually win a deal to build thousands of drones that provide extra surveillance and strike capability in areas that are too dangerous for crewed aircraft.
The program joins the shortlist of major modernization programs at the Pentagon, alongside the B-21 bomber, which is still in development, and the Navy’s frigate program, which is currently behind schedule and over budget.
The plane’s development will have to be squeezed into an overall defense budget that is expected to remain mostly flat, forcing military leaders to make tough decisions over which expensive modernization programs to pursue and which to let die.
Trump on Friday said “certain allies” will also be interested in the new aircraft. The U.S. “will be selling them,” although without many of the sensitive technologies on the U.S. jets. “We like to tone them down about 10 percent, which probably makes sense because someday, maybe they’re not our allies, right?”
