Reflections on Fifth Generation and the Challenge of Understudying Airpower Transformation

Lt. Col. Chip Berke, one of the first Marine pilots to fly the F-22, used to make a point about the iPhone. When Steve Jobs introduced it, he described it as three devices in one: a computer, a music player and a phone. Nobody describes it that way now. What proved revolutionary was the ecosystem that grew up around the phone, not the phone itself.

I have thought about that analogy more or less continuously since I first heard it, because it explains most of what went wrong, and some of what went right, in how the West came to understand fifth-generation airpower. For two decades the argument was about the airplane: its cost, its schedule, its software, its place in a procurement ledger. The airplane was never the point. It was a forcing function, and the real subject was how a force fights, how it is trained, supported and networked, and how its allies fit together. That subject was much harder to see, so it was much harder to study.

I spent the period from 2004 to 2018 trying to study it. In retrospect I was an understudy in the theatrical sense, learning a part by watching the principals perform it, in the hope of being ready when the stage manager called. The word also carries a second meaning, which is that the subject was understudied. The distance between the two is the story I want to tell.

It Began With a Word

The term “fifth generation” came from Michael Wynne, the Secretary of the Air Force whom I worked with as a consultant from 2004 to 2008. It is easy to treat the phrase as marketing, a way to distinguish the F-22 and F-35 from the legacy fighter fleet. Wynne meant something sharper. He was using language to force a break in thinking. Air Vice-Marshal John Blackburn of the Royal Australian Air Force later put it to me plainly: Wynne’s aim was to change how the Air Force talked about these aircraft, because you cannot operate an F-22 or an F-35 the way you operate an F-15 or an F-16.

Wynne’s own thinking was never confined to the platform. An op-ed he drafted in 2007, “The Interdependent Fight,” argued that fifth-generation fighters were not only breakthrough kinetic platforms but battlespace sensors that could collect and disseminate information on the way to and from a target. He was describing what he called “spherical situation awareness,” an idea that sits comfortably inside today’s multi-domain and kill web vocabulary. Each aircraft, in his telling, was a direct arm of the battlespace manager. He was also pushing the department on cyber, on remotely piloted vehicles, and on buying capabilities rather than products. Fifth-generation aircraft were one element of a wider concept of operations, and the concept was the thing he cared about.

One small episode from those years stays with me. Before a trip to Norway, I was asked to bring back the competing fighter presentations for the Norwegian competition. One competitor argued that Norway should buy its aircraft because it was European and the best available today. Another gave fifth generation a single slide. A third gave a genuinely excellent briefing on how its aircraft could enable a networked force. Wynne looked at them and called Lockheed’s chief executive to ask for a slide showing how F-35s working with Aegis would provide battlespace awareness and coverage for Norway. Lockheed produced it, but it plainly was not part of the company’s mental furniture. The vendor was selling an airplane, while the customer’s most senior acquisition leader was already thinking about a system of systems. That gap in assumptions would define the next fifteen years.

The Custodians Leave

Wynne’s departure, along with that of the Air Force Chief of Staff, removed what I came to think of as the custodians of the message. Whatever one thinks of the policy disputes behind it, the practical effect on the fifth-generation conversation was large. The F-22 buy was truncated. The land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dominated the department’s attention and budget. And the F-35 entered what became a long “time of troubles,” during which the program’s acquisition difficulties came to define public perception of what the airplane was.

When I interviewed Billie Flynn, the veteran test pilot, in 2023, he gave the cleanest explanation I have heard of why it took so long for the point to land. People, he said, find it hard to believe what they have never seen. The F-22 had been kept inside what he called a USAF bubble, and it was only gradually understood not as a replacement for the F-15 but as a different kind of aircraft. Wynne and the Chief of Staff, General Moseley, understood this problem. That is why they pushed to put allied pilots and pilots from other services into the F-22 community. Berke was the most notable example. I sought him out at Nellis, and we later interviewed him at Eglin. We set up a Wynne-Berke meeting and got him invited to Australia and Denmark to share what he had learned.

Flynn’s deeper argument was that if you view the F-35 through a legacy, replacement-aircraft mentality, you cannot possibly understand how it transforms warfare. That is a problem of perception that no amount of data can fix. With the custodians gone and a decade of difficulty on the airplane’s record, the replacement frame hardened. “Trillion-dollar aircraft” became the shorthand, based on projections of acquisition and life-cycle cost running half a century forward. Ed Timperlake and I spent years arguing that the headline number was misleading, since the same projections put the legacy fleet’s support costs far higher. We also argued that the F-35 was a fleet and not a single plane, with commonality, upgradeability and allied participation as part of its value. I stand by that argument, but I have also come to see that it was fought on the wrong ground. A cost debate is a debate about a procurement item. The transformation argument is about something else entirely.

The land wars reinforced the same habits of mind. Ben Lambeth, whom I interviewed about the air campaign against ISIS, made the point that a generation of civilian and military leaders had no experience of dealing with peer nuclear powers that also possess significant conventional capability. Airpower had been reduced to a support element for ground maneuver, operating in permissive airspace, and the habits of that environment shaped what people expected a combat aircraft to be for. As General Mike Hostage, then Air Combat Command’s commander, noted in one of our interviews, the fleet of remotely piloted aircraft that was so effective over Afghanistan might simply not transfer to the vast distances of the Pacific or to contested airspace. In his view, the air combat cloud had to define the role of those systems, not the other way around.

Why This Subject Is Hard to Study

It is worth being honest about why airpower transformation resists analysis, because the failure was not only a failure of political will. There are structural reasons.

The first is that the thing being studied is relational. A platform can be described by its specifications, but an ecosystem has to be described by how its parts behave together, and most of those interactions do not exist until the force is built and exercised. In the early years, the F-35’s most important capabilities were things like data fusion, fleet-wide software updates, and the ability to share a common picture across services and allies. All of these were hard to demonstrate in a press briefing and easy to dismiss as promises. General Hostage’s observation that the aircraft “is not a boutique aircraft” captures this: the full impact comes only with the fleet, and the fleet takes years to exist.

The second is that the evidence appears at the edges, away from where observers are looking. I learned this on the USS Wasp. I was fortunate to be aboard for two of the three F-35B sea trials in 2011, and the trials were the obvious story: a supersonic, short-takeoff, vertical-landing fighter operating from an amphibious ship. But what mattered was happening elsewhere. The ship was serving as a test bed for an entirely new at-sea capability, one that would later become evident when the USS America and HMS Queen Elizabeth operated in the same way. The same had been true a year earlier with the Osprey in the Bold Alligator exercises, where journalists waited on the beach for an amphibious assault that was in fact being conducted by Ospreys deep inland. The observers who stayed with the visible event missed the actual one.

An Osprey operator I interviewed after Bold Alligator 2012 put the underlying logic in a chess analogy. A traditional amphibious group, he said, moves a pawn one space at a time toward the enemy. With the Osprey’s speed and range you can move a knight, a bishop or a rook and come at the opponent from behind. The point generalizes. Transformation shows up first in changed geometry, in operating radii that expand from 100 miles to hundreds, and in the relationship between ships, aircraft and ground forces. A reporter or analyst focused on a single platform’s performance statistics will not see that.

The third reason is that the debate was never really about the plane. Flynn argued that a program like this has to operate inside a triangle of politicians, the media and the public, and that marketing an aircraft as a platform was never going to be enough. The program was a proxy for a larger argument about what kind of military the West needed after the land wars, and for much of the period the answer from the political level was not to need one at all. In the foreword to my book, Lt. Gen. George Trautman, the former Marine deputy commandant for aviation, makes a related point. He notes that the aircraft was often treated as the residue of worn-out Cold War thinking. If the strategic premise is that the future looks like the last decade, an expensive, high-end combat system looks like an anachronism, and no analysis of its technical merits will persuade anyone otherwise.

The Method: Go Where the Operators Are

If the subject is relational, appears at the edges, and is entangled in politics, how do you study it? My answer, developed more by trial and error than by design, was to go to the operators and stay there.

That meant Eglin, where the F-35 training enterprise was being built from nothing and where my first interview in January 2010 introduced me to what a joint, multi-service, eventually multinational training system looks like when it is assembled from scratch. It meant the Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron One, where tactics for a new generation of aircraft were being invented and tested. It meant Beaufort, Yuma, Nellis and the ships. And it meant repeated conversations with the pilots, maintainers and commanders who were actually discovering what the aircraft could do.

What those conversations taught me, over and over, is that the real innovation was happening at the tactical level, and that it was being generated by people who were willing to unlearn. Berke’s line that fifth-generation pilots have to unlearn several of their instincts and build new ones is the single most useful sentence I collected in fifteen years. A fourth-generation pilot is trained to manage an aircraft’s sensors, weapons and communications, and a fifth-generation pilot has to learn to trust fused data and to think about the aircraft as a node in a network. That is a cognitive shift, not a technical upgrade, and it is why pilots who had flown the F-22 and returned to their home air forces became such effective ambassadors. They had seen it, and they could say so to their peers.

It is also why the cross-service dimension mattered. When Air Force and Marine pilots log hours on the same aircraft and share lessons across three ready rooms, you get what I called a combat learning revolution: a pool of knowledge that is larger than any one service’s. Studying that process from outside is difficult, since it lives in squadrons, warfighting centers and debriefs. You can only understudy it by being there, asking questions repeatedly, and publishing what you learn so that the learning travels.

The Partners Who Saw It First

One of the more surprising findings of those years was that some of the allies grasped the point before the United States did. Flynn called Australia the exception that proved his rule. For the Australian Defence Force, the F-35 was understood from the beginning as the spearhead of fifth-generation warfare, and not simply as a replacement for the Super Hornet.

My first Sir Richard Williams Foundation seminar, held in Canberra in March 2014, made this vivid. The title was “Air Combat Operations, 2025 and Beyond,” and it happened in the same month MH370 disappeared over the Indian Ocean, which I did not know at the time was a marker of how quickly the strategic environment was about to change. The Chief of the Air Force, Air Marshal Geoff Brown, addressed directly the question people kept asking: with so much capability in 4.5-generation fighters, why do you need fifth generation? His answer was that you must conduct tomorrow’s air combat with tomorrow’s capabilities, and that off-board cueing and networking had to be baseline requirements. He then launched what became Plan Jericho, named, as he made clear, because the walls were going to come tumbling down.

Coming from the American debate, where the aircraft was under daily attack, to a room of senior professionals discussing how to build a fifth-generation force was a breath of fresh air. It showed me what a serious institution looks like when it decides to treat an acquisition as a transformation. Blackburn, who became one of my closest interlocutors on this subject, would later say that the Australian effort was to use language the way Wynne had, to change how the force talked about itself.

Other partners had other experiences. In Italy and the United Kingdom, industrial interests tied to legacy aircraft were ambivalent or opposed, and where they could not stop the airplane they worked against the force transformation that should have come with it. Britain bought the aircraft for its carriers but, in my judgment, did not build the force around it as far as it might have. In the Nordic countries, the arrival of the F-35 coincided with Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 and then the invasion of 2022, and the demand for regional integration may drive greater fleet integration there than anywhere else. And Canada’s repeated delays are, to my mind, a textbook case of the replacement mentality at work: Flynn’s warning that Canadian officials would discover they had a monster on their hands, a transformation of infrastructure, personnel and mindset rather than an Air Force acquisition, is a fair summary of the problem.

The lesson I draw is that the partners who succeeded were those who treated the aircraft as an occasion for institutional change. Those who treated it as a purchase got a purchase.

F-35 2.0 and the Roadblocks

By 2018, I had begun to describe the next phase as “F-35 2.0”: the aircraft was operational, the global fleet was being stood up, but the real work of leveraging it to enable a broader kill web and distributed concepts of operations had barely started. The question was no longer whether the platform worked but how to change everything else around it.

The most useful treatment of that question came from Blackburn in a 2018 interview that I chose to end my book with. He identified several roadblocks, and rereading them now they look less like a 2018 snapshot and more like an agenda for the 2020s.

1. The first is the business model. Defense establishments have spent decades buying standalone platforms and working out afterward how they would fit together. A fifth-generation aircraft that delivers weapons, non-lethal effects, ISR and command-and-control, and that can either strike organically or hand off to a partner, breaks that model. If you pursue integration it drives change; if you do not, you reduce the aircraft to one of its functions. Blackburn’s formulation was that the warfighters get what the F-35 drives in terms of change, but the same integrative approach is not replicated at the level of acquisition, which remains stovepiped. His blunt summary was that we were preparing to fly fifth-generation aircraft in a legacy ecosystem. He also drew a distinction I find clarifying, between innovation by addition, in which every platform is modernized in parallel, and targeting innovation on a lead platform, designing the force around the effect you want to create.
2. The second is energy. Blackburn observed that there were no future energy concepts or designs in place, and that planners had assumed the market would supply the fuel and power a future force needs, which would be close to impossible in a regional crisis.
3. The third is networks: a multiplicity of them, and a legacy security regime that cauterizes information in ways that make no sense for a force operating at fifth-generation speed.
4. The fourth is industrial and weapons policy. Australia, he noted, built conventional ammunition but not missiles, and as he put it, without weapons the aircraft is not much use.

None of these roadblocks is about the airplane.

All of them are about the ecosystem that determines whether the airplane matters.

That is the central lesson I would offer anyone trying to understand airpower transformation: the binding constraints are rarely in the thing you are buying.

What Understudying Teaches

What would I tell someone approaching the next transformation, whether it is autonomous systems, distributed maritime forces, or the new generation of collaborative combat aircraft?

First, watch the language. Wynne understood that a new term, if it carries a new concept, can do institutional work that a budget line cannot. The reverse is also true. When a transformative capability is described in the vocabulary of the old force, as a replacement, a multi-mission upgrade or a better version of what already exists, it will be absorbed by the old force. Blackburn’s distinction between a multi-mission aircraft and a multi-domain one is exactly of this kind.

Second, find the custodians and ask what happens when they are gone. Transformations need people who can explain why the change matters in terms that survive a change in leadership. The F-35 was fortunate that the Marines, with their commitment to the Osprey and the F-35B, carried the program through a period when its strongest backers had been removed. That was not a robust way to run a national program, and it should not be repeated by design.

Third, study at the edge. The decisive evidence will usually appear in an exercise, a sea trial, a squadron’s tactics development, or a partner’s force design process, not in a program review. Go there, and stay long enough to see the same thing happen twice.

Fourth, take the fleet view and the alliance view seriously. A capability that is valuable because it is shared, whether through common software, common training, common sustainment or a common picture, cannot be evaluated one aircraft at a time. And allies are not an afterthought. In this case, several of them were thinking more strategically than the country that built the airplane.

Fifth, expect the roadblocks to be institutional. The questions about energy, networks, weapons and acquisition are less glamorous than the questions about stealth and sensors, and they are where programs actually succeed or fail.

I wrote the book as a record of a journey, and I said in its introduction that I wanted to be a recorder of history for the operators of many nations who made this capability real despite the media and many government officials who wanted to see them fail.

That remains the right way to describe what I was doing.

An understudy does not write the play, but an understudy who has watched closely enough can sometimes see, before the principals do, which scenes are going to matter.

What I saw, again and again, was that the airplane was the least interesting part of the story, and the part that is hardest to see is the force that forms around it.