Andrew Latham
It is a peculiar feature of American defense politics that the most critical capabilities are often developed not in times of clarity, but in moments of institutional confusion and political upheaval. The F/A-XX program—the Navy’s next-generation air dominance platform—is a case in point. It is unfolding amid a fractured political landscape at home and an accelerating airpower race abroad. And it is happening, for better or worse, on Donald Trump’s watch. This fact, more than any technical specification or budgetary detail, will shape its destiny.
The Navy needs the F/A-XX. That much is not in dispute. The carrier air wing as it currently stands is at risk of obsolescence in a world of Chinese hypersonic missiles, expanding anti-access bubbles, and increasingly sophisticated adversary air defenses. The F/A-18 Super Hornet, capable as it is, belongs to an era in which the U.S. Navy could operate with near-impunity within the first and second island chains. That era is over. China is now fielding systems designed explicitly to deny the U.S. military freedom of maneuver in precisely those spaces. And in the absence of a credible next-generation platform with range, stealth, and networked lethality, the carrier will revert to what it was in 1941—large, visible, and vulnerable.
But if the strategic case for F/A-XX is ironclad, the political reality surrounding it is anything but. Trump’s re-election—completed not in a blaze of national unity, but amid ongoing legal challenges and accusations of electoral manipulation—has not produced policy coherence. It has produced something more familiar: disruption, improvisation, and theatrical executive authority. The irony is that this may be exactly what the F/A-XX needs. For all the programmatic discipline and bureaucratic caution that the Obama and Biden administrations attempted to bring to defense procurement, the result was paralysis. Trump, by contrast, may lack a strategic theory, but he does possess a tactical instinct for moving fast and breaking things. And the defense establishment—riven by inertia and allergic to risk—may need that kind of velocity more than it cares to admit.
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