Shaping the Future of Airpower: Integration, Innovation, and Institutional Transformation

Our new airpower evolution report examines five interconnected developments that collectively reveal how American and allied airpower stands at a critical inflection point.

Rather than awaiting revolutionary new platforms, the path to sixth-generation capabilities runs through the systematic evolution of existing fifth-generation systems, the integration of autonomous collaborative aircraft, and fundamental transformation in how combat pilots are trained to operate within persistent complexity.

These developments demonstrate that generational transitions in military aviation are increasingly defined by operational behavior and networked integration rather than platform characteristics alone.

The Desert Storm Blueprint and Its Abandonment

The report opens with a sobering assessment of how the United States has systematically unlearned the lessons that enabled its last decisive military victory. Lieutenant General David Deptula’s analysis of Desert Storm’s 35th anniversary reveals an institutional failure extending far beyond operational doctrine. The 1991 campaign succeeded through an effects-based, systems approach to warfare that targeted Iraq’s ability to function as a coherent military entity rather than pursuing traditional attrition. Precision-guided munitions, stealth technology, and strategic discipline converged to achieve unprecedented results: coalition forces attacked more discrete targets in the opening 24 hours than the Eighth Air Force struck over two years in Europe during World War II.

Yet this proven approach was abandoned for prolonged counterinsurgency campaigns that consumed vast resources without achieving strategic objectives. Over twenty years following 9/11, the Army received $1.3 trillion more than the Air Force to fund ground campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq that ultimately failed, while Air Force combat forces shrank to 40 percent of their Desert Storm size. This reflects strategic incoherence: the United States optimized for conflicts it chose to fight rather than conflicts it needs to win against peer adversaries.

The connection between Desert Storm’s operational success and contemporary training challenges proves crucial. The campaign demonstrated the power of attacking adversaries as integrated systems, but this requires pilots who think in terms of effects and networks rather than platforms and sorties.

Modern fifth-generation aircraft provide the tools to execute such approaches at unprecedented scale, yet traditional training methods designed for earlier eras actively inhibit the cognitive development necessary to employ these capabilities effectively. When student pilots exhaust their mental capacity simply keeping difficult-to-fly training aircraft stable, they have insufficient cognitive bandwidth remaining for learning mission systems, information management, and tactical thinking.

Italy’s International Flight Training School represents the alternative: a facility designed from inception around Live-Virtual-Constructive training that integrates live aircraft, high-fidelity simulators, and computer-generated forces into seamless environments. This produces tactical thinkers who happen to fly aircraft rather than exceptional stick-and-rudder pilots who must later learn tactical employment. The paradigm shift in combat pilot training is not a luxury but a prerequisite for the warfare that Desert Storm previewed and fifth-generation aircraft now enable.

Collaborative Combat Aircraft: From Concept to Operational Reality

The transformation of Collaborative Combat Aircraft from conceptual “loyal wingman” proposals to concrete prototypes achieving first flight demonstrates how rapidly the defense establishment can move when institutional consensus emerges around operational requirements.

By 2025-2026, CCAs evolved into a family of large, jet-powered uncrewed systems tightly linked to manned platforms and backed by growing budgets, incremental acquisition strategies, and intensive experimentation with autonomy and manned-unmanned teaming.

The Air Force’s program pacing reflects this urgency. General Atomics’ YFQ-42A achieved first flight in August 2025, less than two years after program start, while Anduril’s YFQ-44A followed in October. These prototypes are not being treated as purely experimental demonstrators but as the core of operational learning efforts linking early flight results directly to tactics development and future requirement refinement. The service’s decision to select Beale Air Force Base as the preferred location for a CCA Aircraft Readiness Unit signals commitment to standing up real-world support and deployment infrastructure rather than keeping capabilities locked inside test ranges.

Financially, CCA has become central to future combat air budgets, with the broader NGAD family of systems receiving nearly $28.5 billion over five years. The promise of achieving step changes in numbers at a fraction of crewed fighter costs drives this investment: Increment 1 CCAs target roughly $30 million per aircraft compared with multiple hundreds of millions for sixth-generation NGAD fighters, allowing planners to envision each crewed aircraft operating alongside several uncrewed teammates.

What proves most significant is the spread of CCA concepts across all services. By late 2025, the Navy, Marine Corps, and Army had all launched programs aimed at fielding capabilities around 2030, building on Air Force experience while tailoring designs and employment concepts to maritime and expeditionary missions. This transformation from Air Force niche project to joint expectation indicates that CCA-style systems have passed their initial credibility test and entered a decisive phase where key questions shift from “can it be built?” to “can it be fielded at scale and integrated into real operations?”

Combat Validation: Israel’s Operation Rising Lion

The theoretical promise of fifth-generation capabilities received decisive validation through Israel’s June 2025 Operation Rising Lion against Iran. Over twelve days, Israeli aircraft flew more than 1,400 sorties against targets over 1,000 miles away without losing a single manned aircraft, sustaining battle damage, or suffering major mechanical failures. At the operational heart of this unprecedented achievement stood the F-35, performing so essentially that Israeli pilots refused to enter Iranian airspace without F-35s leading the way.

The Jewish Institute for National Security of America’s comprehensive analysis reveals capabilities that exceeded even optimistic expectations. The F-35’s sensor fusion and information-sharing allowed F-16s and F-15Is to engage targets detected by F-35s without ever activating their own radars, a critical advantage against sophisticated air defenses.

Even more significantly, the aircraft’s ability to detect air defense systems operating in survivability mode and remaining invisible to standard intelligence collection proved decisive. When Iranian radar or missile sites activated, F-35s immediately spotted them, relayed targeting information to other aircraft, and enabled rapid precision strikes against defenses that would otherwise have gone unnoticed.

This integration fundamentally shaped Israeli operational doctrine. No aircraft entered Iranian airspace unless F-35s were present, whether leading formations directly or escorting packages from dozens of miles away. Israeli military leaders told researchers this wasn’t hyperbole but operational reality: the F-35’s sensor capabilities, survivability features, and real-time electronic warfare adaptations were essential for operating in contested airspace.

The aircraft’s combination of multi-role capabilities, intelligence sharing, and networked combat effectiveness established it as the critical centerpiece enabling Israel to achieve air superiority rapidly and maintain it throughout the campaign.

The strategic implications extend beyond Israeli defense. Operation Rising Lion validated decades of American investment in the F-35 program and demonstrated capabilities that reinforce deterrence across multiple theaters. It also revealed critical lessons about how sensor fusion and networked operations represent fundamental shifts in how air campaigns can be conducted.

The F-35’s ability to serve simultaneously as strike platform, electronic warfare asset, intelligence collection system, and command-and-control node created operational possibilities that simply did not exist with previous aircraft generations.

The Behavioral Path to Sixth Generation

These operational realities enable reconceptualization of what defines generational transitions in air warfare. Former Secretary of the Air Force Michael Wynne provided clear articulation of fifth-generation concepts during the F-35’s early development: a fundamental shift from platform-centric thinking to network-centric operations where stealth, sensor fusion, and information dominance define combat effectiveness.

In contrast, sixth-generation concepts have remained frustratingly opaque, with various characteristics proposed but no equivalent clarity about what fundamentally distinguishes this generation.

However, one element has emerged with increasing clarity: the crewed fighter operating in wolfpack configuration with Collaborative Combat Aircraft. This human-machine teaming represents genuinely revolutionary operational shifts. Yet the critical insight that defense planners are beginning to recognize is that the F-35 itself can be reworked to serve as quarterback in such formations.

Rather than waiting for entirely new airframes to deliver sixth-generation capabilities, we are witnessing hybrid transitions where existing fifth-generation platforms evolve to exhibit sixth-generation behavior through integration with autonomous systems.

This realization forces reconceptualization of generational transitions. Previous generations were defined primarily by platform characteristics: fourth-generation fighters introduced fly-by-wire controls and beyond-visual-range missiles; fifth-generation platforms added stealth and sensor fusion.

The leap to sixth generation, however, is better understood as behavioral rather than platform-based transition, defined by how forces operate rather than what individual platforms can do.

An F-35 operating alone exhibits fifth-generation behavior. The same F-35, upgraded with enhanced processing and communications and operating as quarterback for a formation of four CCAs, exhibits sixth-generation behavior. The platform itself evolves incrementally, but operational capability transforms fundamentally.

This represents practical application of force multiplier integration concepts where the whole exceeds the sum of its parts. The F-35 becomes more capable when paired with CCAs than it could ever be through internal upgrades alone; the CCAs become exponentially more effective under human direction than they could be operating autonomously.

Italy’s Strategic Positioning: Training as Force Multiplier

Italy’s €112.6 million investment in establishing the Lightning Training Center at Trapani-Birgi represents far more than conventional infrastructure development. As the first F-35 pilot training center outside the United States, scheduled to achieve initial capability by December 2028, this facility positions Italy as a permanent European node within the global F-35 training network while revealing how training ecosystems built on proven methodologies serve as foundational architecture for sixth-generation demands.

The Lightning Training Center builds directly on success at Italy’s International Flight Training School at Decimomannu, where synergy between the Italian Air Force and Leonardo has demonstrated capacity to deliver world-class advanced aviation training. The IFTS represents revolutionary shifts from traditional stick-and-rudder instruction to cognitive-focused education emphasizing information management and network-centric operations.

This training methodology prioritizes building mental models over mechanical skill acquisition, using Live-Virtual-Constructive environments where students develop cognitive capacity to manage information flow, prioritize threats, and execute decisions within compressed timelines.

This architecture proves particularly relevant to F-35 preparation because it addresses fundamental challenges: the aircraft’s capabilities far exceed traditional pilot workload management paradigms. F-35 pilots operate not as individual platform commanders but as nodes within distributed kill webs, synthesizing data from multiple sensors, sharing targeting information across formations, and coordinating effects with both manned and unmanned assets.

The cognitive skills developed through IFTS’s methodology provide precisely the foundation required for this transition.

The facility’s strategic positioning extends beyond national requirements to enable collective capabilities essential for allied operations. Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Poland, Finland, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Germany, and Belgium have all committed to F-35s, creating demand for qualified pilots exceeding Luke Air Force Base’s finite capacity.

A European training hub reduces costs, eliminates transatlantic personnel rotations, and creates opportunities for tactical standardization and interoperability training essential for coalition operations.

Conclusion: The Transformation Imperative

Taken together, these developments reveal airpower transformation occurring not through revolutionary new platforms but through systematic integration of existing systems with emerging autonomous capabilities, enabled by training methodologies that develop cognitive capacity to operate within persistent complexity.

The path to sixth-generation warfare runs through the F-35 evolved into a quarterback commanding autonomous teammates, validated by operational success in combat, and enabled by training ecosystems that produce tactical thinkers capable of managing distributed networks rather than simply flying aircraft.

This transformation reflects pragmatic recognition that strategic competition with peer adversaries does not allow the luxury of waiting for perfect solutions. It demands fielding effective capabilities rapidly using available platforms.

The hybrid transition approach leverages existing industrial capacity, preserves international partnerships, and allows incremental risk reduction through rapid iteration of autonomous systems while avoiding the decades of cost growth and schedule delays that characterized previous revolutionary programs.

The urgency is real. China studied Desert Storm’s lessons and built military capabilities designed to counter the advantages it revealed. Meanwhile, the United States military risked forgetting how to execute effects-based, systems approaches while distracted by unwinnable counterinsurgency campaigns.

Future conflicts will be fast, intense, multi-domain contests against adversaries who can contest all domains from the outset. Success will require intelligent application of military power through effects-based approaches, exactly what Desert Storm demonstrated and what fifth-generation aircraft enable when properly employed within kill webs rather than as individual platforms.

The transformation from platform-centric to network-centric warfare, from kill chains to kill webs, from crisis management to chaos management—these are cognitive transformations that must be embedded in training from the first day. The paradigm shift in combat pilot training is not luxury but prerequisite for the warfare that emerging threats demand and advanced aircraft enable.

Italy’s strategic positioning demonstrates that training constitutes strategic architecture as critical as aircraft design or manufacturing capacity, with methodologies applicable across generational transitions and transferable to sixth-generation operations.

This report ultimately argues that sixth-generation warfare is achievable today through behavioral transformation rather than awaiting distant revolutionary platforms. The conceptual clarity that defined fifth-generation capabilities has been absent from sixth-generation discussions perhaps because we’ve been looking in the wrong place: in platform specifications rather than operational behavior.

Once we recognize that sixth-generation warfare is fundamentally about the wolfpack, the path forward becomes clear: evolve the F-35 into the quarterback it was designed to become and pair it with autonomous teammates that technology now makes possible.

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