Gen. David Allvin, the Air Force Chief of Staff, stood before the House Armed Services Committee in early 2025 and delivered a blunt assessment: China’s fleet of J-20 stealth fighters is growing fast enough to challenge the air superiority the United States has held for decades. The Pentagon’s own 2024 China Military Power Report estimates that the People’s Liberation Army Air Force now fields more than 200 J-20s, with production accelerating. Allvin told lawmakers the window for maintaining a decisive American edge is narrowing, and that the service’s answer depends on getting two programs into the field quickly: the Boeing F-47, the Air Force’s first new crewed fighter in nearly three decades, and a fleet of autonomous combat drones designed to fly alongside it.
Congress heard the warning and responded with something more concrete than applause. The fiscal year 2026 defense bill, H.R. 3838, introduced in the 119th Congress, includes binding language that names the F-47 by designation and requires the Air Force to submit detailed cost baselines, production milestones, and capability benchmarks before scaling up procurement spending. The provision is not a rubber stamp. It is a statutory gate: no data, no money.
Why the F-47 exists
The F-47 traces its lineage to the Next Generation Air Dominance program, or NGAD, which the Air Force restructured in 2024 after concluding that the original design had become too expensive to buy in meaningful numbers. The service wanted a fighter that could eventually replace the aging F-22 Raptor, the only dedicated air-superiority stealth fighter in the U.S. inventory, while also serving as the crewed node in a networked formation of autonomous wingmen.
In April 2025, the Air Force selected Boeing over Lockheed Martin to build the F-47. The choice surprised parts of the defense industry, given Lockheed’s decades-long dominance in stealth fighter production. Boeing’s pitch reportedly emphasized affordability and manufacturing scalability, two qualities the Air Force now prizes after watching per-unit costs on the F-35 program climb for years. Exact unit costs for the F-47 have not been disclosed, though earlier NGAD estimates circulated in the $200 million to $300 million range before the restructure aimed to bring that figure down.
The drone wingmen
The F-47 is not designed to fly alone. The Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, or CCA, is developing autonomous and semi-autonomous drones that will operate in formations with crewed fighters, absorbing risk, carrying additional sensors and weapons, and extending the reach of a single pilot. In 2024, the service awarded Increment 1 contracts to Anduril Industries and General Atomics to build the first CCA prototypes, with initial flight testing underway.
The concept is straightforward on a whiteboard: a single F-47 pilot directs two or more drones that can scout ahead, jam enemy radars, or launch their own weapons. In practice, the engineering is formidable. Reliable data links must function in contested electromagnetic environments. The autonomy software has to make split-second decisions without constant human input. And the entire system has to be affordable enough that the Air Force can buy drones in large quantities without replicating the cost problems of crewed platforms.
The NDAA’s reporting requirements name the F-47 explicitly, but the scope of congressional oversight applied to the CCA drones is less clearly defined in the available bill text. Whether the drones will be tracked as a tightly coupled subsystem of the F-47 program or managed as a parallel effort with its own milestones remains an open question. That distinction matters: if the drone program hits a technical snag, the Air Force needs to know whether it can keep fielding F-47s on schedule or whether the two are contractually and operationally locked together.
What China is fielding
The urgency behind both programs traces directly to what the Pentagon sees on the other side of the Pacific. China’s Chengdu J-20, which entered service around 2017, is the country’s first operational stealth fighter. The 2024 China Military Power Report assessed that the PLA Air Force has moved well beyond initial operating capability and is producing J-20s at a pace that suggests a fleet of several hundred within the next few years.
Beijing is also developing a second stealth fighter. The Shenyang FC-31, now designated the J-35, has appeared in carrier-capable and land-based variants. While the J-35 is generally considered a medium-weight complement to the heavier J-20 rather than a direct peer to the F-47, its existence means China is building a two-fighter stealth ecosystem, much as the United States did with the F-22 and F-35.
Allvin’s warning to Congress centered on trajectory, not parity. No senior U.S. official has publicly claimed that the J-20 matches the F-22 in air-to-air performance. The concern is volume: if China can produce stealth fighters faster than the United States can field replacements for its 180-odd F-22s, numerical advantage could offset any remaining qualitative gap, particularly in a conflict scenario over the Taiwan Strait where geography favors the side with more aircraft closer to the fight.
Congress wants receipts
The reporting requirements in H.R. 3838 reflect hard lessons from previous fighter programs. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, now the backbone of U.S. tactical aviation, spent years over budget and behind schedule. The F-22 was capped at 187 aircraft, partly because costs per jet soared beyond original projections. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have signaled they are unwilling to write another blank check.
The NDAA language creates enforceable deadlines. The Air Force must deliver program data on a fixed schedule, and funding for production ramp-up is conditioned on those submissions. In effect, Congress has given the service a green light to move fast but has installed speed cameras along the route. If the Air Force misses a reporting deadline or delivers data that fails to satisfy authorizers and appropriators, the money slows down.
For the Air Force, the challenge is proving that the F-47 and CCA combination will deliver a measurable advantage over both legacy U.S. aircraft and the Chinese systems it is designed to counter. That means more than PowerPoint slides. Lawmakers want validated test results, credible cost projections, and a production plan that can actually be executed by Boeing and its subcontractors at the scale and speed the strategic environment demands.
What is still unknown
Several critical details remain outside the public record as of June 2026. The Air Force has not disclosed how many F-47s it intends to buy, what the target unit cost is after the NGAD restructure, or when the fighter will reach initial operational capability. The CCA program’s production quantities and per-drone cost targets are similarly undisclosed. Until the Air Force submits the reports that H.R. 3838 now requires, and until lawmakers release any unclassified summaries, specific numbers should be treated as informed speculation rather than confirmed baselines.
On the Chinese side, precise J-20 inventory figures are classified within the U.S. intelligence community. The “more than 200” estimate from the 2024 China Military Power Report is the most authoritative public figure available, but it carries the inherent uncertainty of any intelligence assessment and may already be outdated. Production rates at Chengdu Aerospace Corporation are not independently verifiable from open sources.
The operational question hanging over everything is whether the manned-unmanned teaming concept will work as advertised in a real fight. Distributed formations, shared targeting, and autonomous decision-making in a jammed electromagnetic environment have been demonstrated in controlled tests but never validated in combat. The gap between a successful exercise and a reliable warfighting capability is where programs either prove themselves or stall, and Congress has made clear it wants to see that gap closed with evidence, not promises.
Urgency versus oversight
The dynamic playing out on Capitol Hill is a familiar one in defense procurement, but the stakes are unusually high. The Air Force argues that China’s production pace leaves no room for the kind of drawn-out development cycles that defined earlier fighter programs. Congressional leaders agree the threat is real but insist that speed without accountability is how the Pentagon ends up with aircraft that cost twice as much and arrive five years late.
Both sides have leverage. The Air Force controls the technical data and the operational arguments. Congress controls the money. The NDAA reporting requirements are the mechanism that connects the two: the service must show its work, and lawmakers must decide whether the results justify the spending. If the F-47 and CCA programs clear those gates on schedule, the United States could begin fielding a fundamentally new kind of air combat force before the end of the decade. If they stumble, the numerical balance Allvin warned about will continue to shift in Beijing’s favor, and the next round of congressional hearings will be considerably less polite.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
