The RAF’s Tempest and the USAF’s F-47 may suppress demand for aerial tankers and aircraft carriers.
Of course, battle plans for battle-planes depend on the executability of current programs, and future governments’ enthusiasm for today’s plans.
The shift by two very capable air forces towards combat aircraft of extreme range cannot but affect demand for complementary and substitute products: aerial tankers and aircraft carriers.
Flying drone force commanders
As the Economist put it recently, tomorrow’s combat aircraft are being designed to hold more fuel, carry more weaponry and boast more computing power than current fleets. Consider three developments from three air arms in three different countries:
US. US Air Force Chief of Staff General Dave Allvin has said that Boeing’s forthcoming F-47 would have a combat range exceeding 1,000 nautical miles, advanced stealth (of course), and a top speed exceeding 1,500 miles per hour. That’s a great deal more than the USAF’s existing F-22s and F-35As. Indeed, it is more F-111 than even F-15E.
UK. On the ‘Team Tempest’ podcast recently, Group Captain ‘Bill’ (surname not provided) of the Royal Air Force described the forthcoming from BAE Systems as an aircraft that could cross the Atlantic un-refueled, suggesting a combat range of 3,000 miles, carrying 10,000 pounds of ordnance. It is a feasible concept: half the payload of an old Vulcan bomber, at slightly greater range. Like that earlier concept, early drawings of the Tempest show a delta wing with huge fuel capacity.
That kind of range means that Tempest could attack targets around the Falklands from Ascension Island with a single refueling over the South Atlantic, or bomb Novosibirsk from England. The group captain explained that the RAF needs that range and payload for survivability. Long-range land-attack missiles pose a greater threat to airfields closer to the enemy, and long-range anti-aircraft missiles could be better avoided by circuitous routes. Fairly, we all have known about both problems for at least 20 years.
Sweden. Saab is working on its own stealthy, supersonic jet, with accompanying drones, and doing both alone. The emphasis is on data fusion, at which the Swedish company has excelled for decades. A Swedish Air Force general once told me about how much better he thought their domestic datalinks were than NATO’s then-standard Link 16; he had flown with both. As Bill Sweetman (see below) recently noted, last August, “Saab acquired Blue Bear, a small British company specializing in the control and coordination of drone swarms.”
Swarms suggest many drones per manned fighter. Notably, the RAF has already assembled what it considers a minimum force of drones — the Storm Shrouds — for air defense suppression, and is planning to buy more. Each F-47 is supposed to be accompanied by just two YQF-42 (General Atomics) or YFQ-44 (Anduril) drones, but as former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall admitted last year, two is just a starting point.
Alternatives to the massive fighter?
One long-standing counterargument to fighting from afar is that shorter-range aircraft can provide much more frequent sorties. However, the drones need not be based alongside the manned aircraft at the same fields. Indeed, the landing gear on GA’ YFQ-42 is designed specifically for rough fields at old WW2 air bases around the Pacific. This is a pending reality: the -42 and Anduril’s -44 are both scheduled to fly later this year.
Another alternative to that range in a single aircraft is to refuel stealthy fighters with stealthy tankers. Very long-range anti-aircraft missiles on enemy fighters should be expected to make short work of the very obvious Airbus and Boeing airliners currently employed. However, designing and building stealthy tankers ab initio was rejected by RAF as too expensive, and also by the USAF, which has far more money.
The emphasis on extreme range is most easily understood in the British context. The USAF already has a subsonic airplane with that kind of range: the B-21 Raider. That is fortunate, because its F-35As can only reach Taiwan from a handful of airfields on Luzon and Okinawa, and the Chinese assuredly have many missiles dialed into those runways and aircraft shelters (see J. M. Dahm, 2024). Sweden has no ability to use that kind of range, with less strategic depth and Russians on the other side of the Baltic Republics. Survival for its Air Force means dispersal and constant movement — tactics practiced long before the Ukrainians put them into practice. Britain, however, is comparatively far from its possible adversaries, and no longer has the V-bombers. The Royal Navy’s aircraft carriers Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales have also been expensive and unreliable. Perhaps worse, they are lacking in aircraft range: their F-35Bs fly half as far with less payload than an F-35A or -C. The ships are also supposed to serve as carriers for Royal Marines and the Royal Navy’s own submarine-hunting helicopters, so they could be busy.
The battle-plane era
Range, payload, and drones. Elon Musk’s prediction at the 2020 Air Force Association symposium that “the fighter jet era has passed” may have two meanings. His immediate intent was to emphasize how drones can already perform almost every combat aircraft mission, more cost-effectively, than manned aircraft. My latter point today is this next generation of manned combat aircraft — assuming that it does get built — will be not quite fighters or bombers.
Long-range aircraft that control other aircraft for fighting forces in the air and on the surface sound something like Douhet’s battle-plane, as conceived by the Italian air power theorist in the 1920s. Sometimes ideas take a century — and a lot of new technology — to percolate. These are effectively the planes which John Stillion described in his influential 2015 assessment of air-to-air combat: bomber-sized fighters, with large quivers of missiles, controlling drones with their own. Because no one dogfights anymore, he considered larger, longer-range aircraft with very long-range missiles the future. The only oddity is the USAF’s emphasis on speed, because even at Mach 2, no one is outrunning the fireball.
Industrial implications: negative for KC-46As and F-35s
The USAF may have already stopped thinking about follow-ons to the current tanker program. The USAF will likely continue replacing at least some of its ancient KC-135s with KC-46As (both from Boeing). Even a thousand-mile F-47 will need tanking, and the service already has 400 F-35As of much shorter range. The large planned fleet of B-21 will require a large number of supporting tankers, but far enough to the rear that a new stealthy tanker will indeed be unnecessary. This would affect the future of US manufacturers, particularly Boeing, more than that of Airbus. This is because the KC-330 program is smaller, with only 18 versus 81 firm orders to be filled, and also more broadly marketable, as the aircraft is a multi-role tanker-transport. Besides, Airbus has no strong capabilities in stealth, and with xenophobic US buying habits, was going nowhere near there anyway.
In the long term, the Royal Navy may start thinking about its carriers more in terms of fleet defense than offensive strike. Alongside Trumpian unreliability, this could in turn limit enthusiasm for further British purchases of F-35Bs. (More on the US demand for aircraft carriers another day.) The bigger problem for Lockheed Martin would be the USAF’s commitment to the F-35A, as the promised range of the F-47 may provide an alluring alternative. Much of that strongly depends, of course, on Boeing’s ability to actually build the F-47, and the next administration’s enthusiasm for an extremely expensive ‘Trump Fighter’.
James M. Hasik PhD
References for Further Reading
“The race to build the fighter planes of the future,” Economist, 14 May 2025.
Bill Sweetman, “More than ever, airpower will depend on sharing data. Watch Sweden,” The Strategist, ASPI, 11 March 2025.
Christopher J. Bowie, The Anti-Access Threat and Theater Air Bases, CSBA, 2002.
Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air, republished in translation by Air University Press, 2019.
J. Michael Dahm, Fighting the Air Base: Ensuring Decisive Combat Sortie Generation Under Enemy Fire, Mitchell Institute, 2024.
John Stillion, Trends in Air-to-Air Combat: Implications for Future Air Superiority, CSBA, 2015.
Joseph Trevithick, “Our First Look At The YFQ-42 ‘Fighter Drone’ Collaborative Combat Aircraft,” The War Zone, 19 May 2025.
Stefano D’Urso, “B-21 Raider’s Extended Range Increases Demand for Aerial Refueling Support,” The Aviationist, 10 March 2025.
Stephen Losey, “Both Air Force CCAs now in ground testing, expected to fly this summer,” Defense News, 20 May 2025.
Stephen Losey, “Air Force eyes longer range for F-47 as combat edge in Pacific theater,” Defense News, 14 May 2025.
Thomas H. Shugart III & Timothy A. Walton, Concrete Sky: Air Base Hardening in the Western Pacific, Hudson Institute, 2025.
Thomas Newdick, “Tempest Future Fighter Aims For “Really Extreme Range,” Twice F-35 Payload,” The War Zone, 28 April 2025.
Tony Osborne, “RAF Readies StormShroud Swarms To Break Adversary Air Defenses,” Aviation Week & Space Technology, 7 May 2025.