NGAD Decision 2025: Lockheed vs. Boeing for the Next-Gen Fighter Jet

UPDATE: Boeing Wins NGAD. The Empire Just Lost Air Dominance.

by Kevin Duska Jr. - March 21, 2025

Well, it happened.

Boeing has officially won the NGAD contract, beating Lockheed Martin for what was supposed to be a sure thing.

The Pentagon cited modularity, sustainability, and integration potential as key factors — but let’s be real: this was also about breaking Lockheed’s chokehold on American airpower.

So now the most important fighter jet of the 21st century is being built by the company best known (lately) for… well, falling short. But maybe that’s the point.

In a post-NATO, MAGA-fractured world where nobody trusts America’s alliances, the Air Force is going all-in on the underdog — probably because they know the NGAD won’t be exported anyway.

Executive Summary

The US DoD is expected to announce its choice for the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program today - the 21st of March, 2025. Boeing and Lockheed are the two favorites in this bid to create a sixth generation stealth fighter that will replace the F-22. With Lockheed favored to win the downselect, the relevance of the NGAD must be called into question. With Portugal having withdrawn from the F-3 program and Canada considering alternatives to it due to Donald Trump's annexation threats and tariff warfare, it is very likely that the NGAD will not be relevant in a post-coalition post-NATO world. In fact, with no guaranteed exports partners and ostensible American allies shifting towards autonomous systems, there is a massive risk that the NGAD will become the next F-22 - a niche fighter that will never see mass adoption.

Introduction: The $20 Billion Dogfight

The Pentagon is poised to award one of the most consequential defense contracts of the 21st century: a $20 billion initial order to design and build the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) fighter — a sixth-generation stealth jet set to replace the venerable but aging F-22 Raptor. The stakes are enormous. This isn’t just a contest between Lockheed Martin and Boeing. It’s a referendum on America’s belief that it will still be flying air superiority fighters in 2050, and that someone — anyone — will be around to buy them.

The NGAD program represents the bleeding edge of military aviation, incorporating artificial intelligence, drone wingmen (CCAs), adaptive engines, and a host of still-classified technologies. Designed to dominate in contested airspace against rising near-peer adversaries like China and Russia, it will be the most expensive fighter program in U.S. history — potentially eclipsing even the F-35 in lifecycle costs. But the announcement expected by Friday, March 21, 2025, is just the beginning. Whichever contractor is selected will likely secure hundreds of billions in follow-on contracts over the next several decades.

Yet all of this is happening against a backdrop of geopolitical fragmentation, budget uncertainty, and diminishing global trust in U.S. strategic reliability. With Donald Trump openly threatening to leave NATO and pull U.S. troops from Europe and Asia, America’s ability to convince allies to co-invest in a sixth-gen airframe is crumbling. And if Washington can’t secure export orders, the NGAD may follow the F-22’s path: elite, expensive, and ultimately niche.

This is more than a dogfight between two aerospace titans. It’s a test of whether the American defense-industrial complex can still project future air dominance — or whether it’s building a fighter jet for an empire that no longer exists.

Why NGAD Exists: A Stealth Legacy Problem

The F-22 Raptor was, by all accounts, a generational leap when it debuted in 2005. It redefined stealth, supercruise, and aerial agility — a technological apex predator built for a Cold War that had already ended. But the F-22 program was killed early, with just 187 airframes ever delivered. The reasons were a cocktail of budget constraints, bureaucratic myopia, and post–9/11 threat recalibrations that emphasized counterterrorism over peer conflict. Fast forward two decades, and the U.S. Air Force is flying a dwindling fleet of Raptors it can’t export, can’t restart production on, and can barely maintain.

Enter NGAD: the Next Generation Air Dominance initiative, which aims to leapfrog current threats by designing a sixth-generation fighter jet from the ground up — not just as a standalone platform, but as the tip of a “family of systems” spear. That family includes unmanned drone wingmen (CCAs), advanced sensors, AI-assisted targeting, and adaptive-cycle engines capable of adjusting power and fuel efficiency mid-flight. In theory, NGAD isn’t just a better F-22. It’s a smarter, faster, deadlier ecosystem designed for the high-end fight against China or Russia — or whoever inherits their tactics.

What NGAD represents is a technological hedge: a bet that the U.S. can preserve air superiority in the face of rising anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) networks, long-range hypersonics, and swarms of cheap drones. It’s also an attempt to avoid past mistakes — namely, relying on a single, bloated platform like the F-35 to do everything poorly instead of letting specialized systems do what they were built for.

But that ambition comes with baggage. As global air combat trends move toward autonomy, swarm tactics, and low-cost saturation, the NGAD's manned stealth fighter centerpiece risks looking like a gold-plated answer to a silver-bullet threat — a fighter designed for dominance that may only exist in simulations. And unlike the 1990s, today’s adversaries are watching in real time, rapidly iterating their own programs like China’s J-20 and Russia’s Su-57, both of which — while still flawed — are produced in greater numbers and getting better every year.

The NGAD program is thus an attempt to correct the F-22’s biggest failure: being too good to cancel but too niche to matter. Whether it succeeds will depend on more than just engineering. It’ll hinge on geopolitics, budgets, and whether the Air Force still believes in air dominance when the next war starts — or whether it’ll be too late to matter.

Geopolitical Disruption: Post-NATO, Trump’s Annexation Talk, and the Vanishing Export Market

The NGAD fighter is being built for a world that no longer exists.

As of early 2025, Donald Trump is deep into his second term, and the geopolitical architecture that underpinned decades of U.S. defense planning — NATO, Five Eyes cohesion, and the Western defense export market — is rapidly unraveling. NGAD may be the most advanced fighter ever conceived, but its timing could not be worse. It’s entering a fractured world with no unified West, no shared threat picture, and no reliable export partners.

NATO, in practical terms, is already dead. The alliance wasn’t formally dissolved, but Trump gutted it functionally. Following repeated threats to “let Russia do what they want” to delinquent member states, and now suggesting U.S. troop withdrawals from Germany, Poland, and the Baltics, the alliance exists now as a hollow acronym — not a fighting force. And as America retreats, the export market for high-end U.S. military platforms is disintegrating with it.

Portugal Walks. Canada Wavers.

The most symbolic rupture came earlier this month, when Portugal officially pulled out of the F-35 program — citing “strategic instability” and “untenable shifts in U.S. policy direction.” Instead of joining the U.S. in fielding fifth-generation stealth fighters, Lisbon has pivoted toward a mixed fleet of Saab Gripens and Eurofighter Typhoons. It’s not about tech. It’s about trust.

Even more shocking, Canada is actively reconsidering its F-35 acquisition. In response to Trump’s 2025 Annexation Remarks — in which he offhandedly mused about “reclaiming parts of North America that never should’ve been let go,” specifically naming Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan and the Great Lakes — Ottawa has quietly opened procurement talks with Sweden, France, and South Korea. These weren’t jokes. They were geopolitical ruptures, and Canada isn’t laughing.

Sources inside the Royal Canadian Air Force confirm that defense officials are assessing non-American alternatives not just on merit, but out of necessity: they don’t know whether Trump’s America will support spares, sustainment, or defense if war comes. And Canada isn’t alone.

America First Means America Alone

Unlike the F-35 — which was built with a multinational funding coalition, reducing unit costs through global buy-in — the NGAD has no such cushion. It is shaping up to be a U.S.-only aircraft, priced at the top of the market, with no serious export prospects on the horizon.

Even longtime partners like Australia, Japan, and South Korea are hedging aggressively. Japan is co-leading the Global Combat Air Program (GCAP) with the UK and Italy. South Korea is moving forward with its KF-21 Boramae stealth fighter and next-gen drone initiatives. Australia is doubling down on loyal wingmen, strike drones, and autonomous ISR platforms.

In short: nobody’s waiting for America anymore. And nobody’s willing to bet on Washington’s long-term reliability.

The ghost of the F-22 looms large here. That aircraft was never exported — not because nobody wanted it, but because Congress banned foreign sales under the Obey Amendment. While NGAD doesn’t yet face the same legal restrictions, the political winds are blowing in the same direction. The Trump administration’s second-term defense strategy has emphasized domestic over allied sustainment, and the MAGA-aligned House caucus views tech-sharing as a liability, not a diplomatic asset.

From Global Arsenal to Boutique Fighter Factory

The result? The U.S. is now building a sixth-generation stealth fighter that only it can afford, only it can fly, and only it believes in. Without NATO. Without Five Eyes cohesion. Without coalition warfighting doctrine.

That leaves NGAD with a very short runway:

• No export revenue to drive unit cost down
• No allied integration to justify scaling
• No guarantee of use in multilateral operations

Even if the Air Force gets its initial squadrons, the broader strategic premise behind NGAD — that it would form the tip of a transatlantic stealth spear — is already dead. And that makes its long-term viability less a matter of airframe performance and more a matter of political gravity.

The world is moving on. And unless something changes dramatically, NGAD may go down in history as the last fighter jet of a dying empire — sleek, lethal, and utterly alone.

4. Lockheed Martin NGAD: The Incumbent’s Edge

If this were a conventional contract cycle — if NATO still existed, if allies were lining up with purchase orders, if Congress wasn't flirting with sequestration-level cuts — then Lockheed Martin would already be printing the contract. On paper, they’re still the frontrunner. They built the F-22 Raptor, they built the F-35 Lightning II, and no other company on Earth has more institutional knowledge about stealth fighter production at scale. In the halls of the Pentagon and the skunkworks labs in Palmdale, Lockheed is still “The Empire’s Armorer.”

But empires, like monopolies, don’t last forever.

Institutional Gravity

Lockheed’s NGAD prototype is rumored to have been the first demonstrator to fly, possibly as early as 2020, under a veiled DARPA initiative that never made it to the public docket. Its design is believed to favor a delta-wing profile, internal weapon bays, multi-spectral stealth, and adaptive-cycle propulsion — in other words, evolutionary advances rooted in F-22 DNA, not revolutionary leaps. And that’s part of both its strength and its vulnerability.

Lockheed understands how to get things through the Air Force acquisition labyrinth. Their internal culture is calibrated for long timelines, closed-door committees, and sustaining programs for 40+ years — often regardless of performance. They are the safe bet. The programmatic inertia. The devil the Pentagon already knows.

And in a post-NATO world, that might be enough.

Technological Continuity vs. Strategic Stagnation

Where Lockheed shines is in integration. Their NGAD is built to slot into existing infrastructure — to talk to F-35s, to manage drone wingmen, to adapt to current sustainment pipelines and logistics frameworks. That minimizes operational friction and procurement risk. But it also means the jet may be incremental, not transformational.

In an era where China is fielding AI-augmented UAV swarms, Russia is betting on hypersonics, and allied nations are investing in decentralized drone fleets, Lockheed’s platform risks becoming the world’s most advanced answer to yesterday’s questions. It’s a killer in the sky, but the sky is no longer the only domain that matters — and it’s no longer guaranteed to be contested by manned platforms.

There’s also the F-35 baggage. While Lockheed won the contract war, it lost the PR battle. Cost overruns, software issues, readiness problems, and constant GAO reports have made the name synonymous with “good enough, but late and overpriced.” For a program that’s projected to cost over $1.7 trillion in total, the F-35 didn’t build trust — it eroded it.

NGAD may be different. But Lockheed will have to prove that difference in an environment where budgets are tightening, exports are dead, and strategic assumptions are collapsing in real time.

Still the Frontrunner — For Now

Despite all that, Lockheed remains the favorite — not because they offer the most daring vision, but because they’ve mastered the political and bureaucratic mechanics of winning anyway. In a Pentagon system still run by risk-averse generals and legacy contractors, familiarity can still beat innovation.

Predicted odds of NGAD downselect win: 75%

But in a post-NATO, MAGA-dominated world where even the Five Eyes are falling apart, Lockheed’s edge may be a short-term victory masking a long-term liability. They might win the contract, yes — but whether they’ll be allowed to build in volume, sell abroad, or reshape the battlespace is another matter entirely.

This could be their last guaranteed win before the world moves on.

Boeing NGAD: The Challenger’s Pitch

If Lockheed Martin is the empire, Boeing is the rebellion — battered, erratic, but still swinging. Once the crown jewel of American aerospace, Boeing spent the last decade in corporate purgatory: bleeding public trust, buried in scandal, and watching its rivals eat its lunch. But NGAD may be their shot at redemption — not just to prove they can still build elite military hardware, but to reassert relevance in a future that doesn’t trust monopolies.

And in a contracting global order, where export markets are collapsing and Washington is desperate to avoid another Lockheed lockout, Boeing might be the surprise pick if politics — not pedigree — drive the call.

From Punchline to Pitchman

It wasn’t long ago that Boeing’s military reputation was in shambles. The KC-46 Pegasus tanker was plagued by delays and delivery issues. The T-7A Red Hawk trainer was supposed to be a clean-sheet revolution — instead, it’s been grounded in paperwork and software bugs. And the company’s commercial wing? 737 MAX. Enough said.

But behind the headlines, Boeing has been quietly rebuilding its defense unit. The T-7 is finally stabilizing. The F-15EX is back in production. And NGAD is their chance to show they’ve learned the lesson Lockheed never did: design for maintainability, cost, and modular upgrade paths — not just raw power.

Boeing’s rumored NGAD design leans into modularity and cost-effective sustainment. It’s built to be fielded and maintained by fewer personnel, to integrate with multi-domain sensors, and to pivot between missions with plug-and-play loadouts. While Lockheed goes deeper into hyper-stealth and bespoke systems, Boeing is pitching something more flexible, more affordable, and more future-proof — at least on paper.

Strategic Appeal in a Divided Government

This is where Boeing could win by losing less.

The DoD and Congress are increasingly nervous about Lockheed Martin’s dominance in every air domain: F-22, F-35, classified ISR platforms, hypersonics, satellites. Picking Boeing wouldn’t just be a procurement decision — it would be a strategic diversification move, signaling that the Pentagon isn’t completely captured by a single defense contractor.

If Boeing can demonstrate that their prototype meets minimum performance thresholds, has a clearer sustainment path, and allows for faster upgrades over a 40-year lifecycle, they may become the less sexy but more survivable option — especially if budgets start collapsing under Trump’s America First austerity wave.

In short, Boeing’s best argument isn’t that their plane is better. It’s that the future is messy, unstable, and unpredictable — and you don’t need a perfect jet, you need one you can actually afford, fix, and field when the shooting starts.

The Underdog, But Not Out of the Fight

Boeing still faces massive headwinds:

• They’ve never delivered a stealth fighter.
• Their procurement track record is shaky at best.
• Their relationships inside the Pentagon are less baked-in than Lockheed’s lifer pipelines.

But they’ve learned to pitch themselves as the anti-Lockheed: more adaptable, less bureaucratic, and more in touch with what tomorrow’s Air Force might actually need — especially if NGAD is fielded in small elite squadrons, not as a mass platform.

Predicted odds of NGAD downselect win: 25%

If they win, it’ll be the biggest comeback in military aerospace since the YF-17 morphed into the F/A-18. If they lose, they still position themselves as the alternative the Pentagon should’ve picked — setting up for next-gen drone programs, AI integrations, and rapid prototyping contracts that follow.

Either way, Boeing is back in the game.

Limited Adoption Risk: The “Next F-22” Problem

Even if the Pentagon makes its downselect this week — even if the chosen prototype meets every performance benchmark and survives congressional infighting — there’s still a high probability that the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program will never scale beyond a handful of elite squadrons. That’s not a failure of engineering. It’s a failure of context.

The NGAD isn’t just another fighter. It’s a bet on air dominance as a doctrine, manned platforms as centerpiece tools, and U.S. geopolitical primacy as a given. In 2025, all three of those bets look increasingly reckless.

No Coalition, No Scale

The F-22 Raptor was the most dominant air superiority fighter ever built. It also became a cautionary tale. Capped at just 187 airframes, banned from export, and too expensive to restart, the F-22 became a museum piece before its time. The NGAD faces similar constraints — except now, the political and economic headwinds are even stronger.

Without NATO co-investment, without export partners, and without a unified Western doctrine, the U.S. alone is footing the NGAD bill. That means fewer units, slower rollout, and potentially massive delays if a future administration deprioritizes air superiority in favor of space, cyber, and unmanned strike ecosystems.

And that’s not theoretical. Trump’s second term has already gutted the multilateral support base that made programs like the F-35 viable. With Portugal out, Canada wavering, and European allies building their own jets, NGAD is flying into a vacuum — one where no one else is buying and no one else is building to support it.

Global Threat Vectors Are Shifting

The assumption that a sixth-generation manned fighter will dominate future battlefields is increasingly challenged by cheap, scalable threats:

• Drone swarms that overwhelm defenses
• AI-assisted air denial systems
• Hypersonic missiles targeting forward bases
• Electronic warfare saturation zones

In this world, a $300 million airframe is more liability than asset if it can’t operate safely from range, network with autonomous wingmen, or survive in a contested electromagnetic spectrum.

Even the most hawkish defense planners now admit that NGAD won’t replace the F-22 at scale. At best, it will serve as a tip-of-the-spear asset, deployed in limited numbers for high-end conflict deterrence. Think fewer than 100 aircraft, with no foreign basing, and no second source for parts if the program faces even mild political sabotage.

Estimated probability of NGAD entering service in squadron strength by 2035: 70%
Estimated probability of NGAD reaching full export production: 30%
Estimated probability of NGAD becoming “the next F-22”: 60%

Boutique Fighter in a Multipolar World

There’s no shame in building an elite platform for a shrinking empire. But there’s no strategic vision in pretending it will scale like the F-16 did. The NGAD may be technically stunning. It may dominate anything the Chinese or Russians can field in a fair fight. But the next war won’t be fair — and it won’t be fought by symmetrical powers in air-to-air duels over open deserts.

The world is tilting toward asymmetry, attrition, and autonomy. In that world, the NGAD looks less like the future and more like a final statement piece — a stealth monument to a past where America ruled the skies and its allies followed without question.

That past is gone. And the NGAD may be the last jet to learn that lesson the hard way.

Strategic Outlook: The Empire’s Last Fighter?

The NGAD is more than a weapons system. It’s a declaration — one last, thunderous assertion that the United States will continue to own the skies well into the second half of the 21st century. That it will still lead the technological charge. That it will still determine the tempo, terms, and tools of great-power conflict.

But for all its stealth, AI, and adaptive engines, NGAD may be a tactical masterpiece built on a collapsing strategic premise. The era of unipolar dominance — where U.S. airpower sat unchallenged at the top of the food chain — is over. And the world knows it.

Defense Doctrine in Freefall

Everything the NGAD was built to assume — coalition warfare, forward basing, aerial supremacy, and seamless integration with allied air forces — has been shaken loose in just a few short years. The collapse of NATO, the fragmentation of Five Eyes, and the rise of nationalist procurement strategies worldwide have turned the global defense market inward. Countries don’t want to be interoperable anymore. They want to be sovereign.

Trump’s second term has accelerated that decoupling. And with the U.S. shifting toward fortress defense, tariff warfare, and zero-sum alliance skepticism, even its closest partners no longer want to be downstream from American military strategy. That makes NGAD a hard sell even to allies — let alone neutral states watching the U.S. turn inward and lash out.

Tactical Brilliance, Strategic Irrelevance?

Technically, NGAD may be astonishing. It could outfly the J-20, spoof every radar system on Earth, and dogfight circles around the Su-57. But it may never do any of those things — not because it’s incapable, but because the battlespace has already changed.

In a future of denied environments, autonomous kill chains, and long-range missile warfare, the manned fighter jet — no matter how advanced — may become what the battleship was by 1942: a relic of a past theory of war.

And if that’s true, then NGAD isn’t the next F-22. It’s the Iowa-class of airpower. Beautiful, deadly, and already obsolete by the time it enters service.

Symbol Over Substance?

In some ways, NGAD’s real value may not be measured in combat performance, but in symbolism. It’s a flex to the world — a warning shot that the U.S. still has teeth. That it can still build the most advanced fighter jet ever flown. That it still matters.

But flexing is expensive. And when budgets tighten, alliances fracture, and drone swarms are winning wars for a tenth of the price, symbolic dominance stops being worth the bill.

Unless NGAD evolves rapidly — integrating with unmanned systems, reducing cost curves, and proving operational relevance in degraded environments — it may become a vanity project for a nation that no longer believes in air dominance, but can’t bear to admit it.

It’s the Empire’s last fighter. And maybe, that’s exactly what it was always meant to be.

Recommendations for Analysts & Industry Watchers

Whether or not NGAD flies in numbers, the program itself will shape the next decade of U.S. defense procurement, aerospace investment, and sixth-gen spinouts. But to understand where this is really going — and where the real value is hiding — you have to look beyond the jet. The most important stories in NGAD won’t be found in press releases. They’ll be buried in subcontract awards, budget reprogramming, and the quiet exodus of foreign buyers.

Here's how to track the real signal in the noise:

A. Watch the Subcontractor Ecosystem

The winning prime — Lockheed or Boeing — will subcontract a significant percentage of the NGAD buildout. Sensor fusion, adaptive propulsion, composite materials, low-observable coatings, edge AI, and data fusion for CCA control are all domains where smaller vendors will pick up key roles.

• Track DARPA funding flows and Air Force Research Lab grants tied to NGAD-adjacent tech.
• Look at who gets long-lead contracts, even before the main production award. That’s where the program’s direction becomes visible.

B. Monitor Congressional Appropriations Pressure

The biggest risk to NGAD isn't technical — it's fiscal. Trump’s second term has brought austerity hawks back into the spotlight, many of whom are anti-interventionist and anti-defense-industrial-complex.

• Watch markup language from the House Armed Services Committee and Senate Appropriations in the FY2026 NDAA.
• Any sign of a “limited fleet” compromise is a warning bell: it means NGAD will be capped like the F-22.

C. Advise Allies to Hedge Procurement Bets

If you're advising foreign governments or private-sector defense integrators, assume export restrictions will reemerge. The U.S. has made it clear that “tech sovereignty” beats interoperability under Trump.

• Recommend clients pursue dual-path strategies (e.g., combine GCAP or KF-21 buys with domestic UAV development).
• Assume no meaningful NGAD export variant before 2040, and prepare accordingly.

D. Follow Drone Wingman Integration Trials Closely

NGAD’s long-term value will be as a command node for autonomous systems, not as a lone dogfighter. The Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program — including Kratos, General Atomics, and others — will determine whether NGAD becomes a force multiplier or a solo asset in a hostile sky.

• Track CCA flight integration tests starting 2026.
• Monitor for divergence in data protocols — a telltale sign that the NGAD platform is being siloed or struggling with joint AI ops.

E. Red-Team the Operational Assumptions

Most open-source projections for NGAD assume clean skies, stable basing, and clear targets. That’s fantasy.

• Simulate denied spectrum conditions and forward base attrition scenarios.
• Model low-orbit ISR saturation, hypersonic strike interruptions, and electronic warfare jamming.
• Assume NGAD is forced to launch from further back than doctrine currently allows.

The Air Force may still call NGAD the “crown jewel of air dominance.” But if your clients are thinking two moves ahead, the smarter play is to treat it as a limited-use platform in a high-threat, low-trust world.

Closing Note

The NGAD may be the most advanced fighter ever built. But this war won’t be won by the best plane — it’ll be won by the side that adapts faster, sustains cheaper, and outlasts the narrative. Right now, the United States is building the most dangerous aircraft on Earth for a world that may never need it — and may never forgive the price tag.

Act accordingly.