Only the F/A-XX Can Keep the Navy in the Fight
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.
Yet Trump’s involvement cuts both ways. He is not a strategist; he is a political animal. And his instincts have always been transactional. If he comes to believe that the F/A-XX is a threat to his other priorities—say, a renewed industrial tariff regime, or the rebuilding of Army ground forces, or a pet missile defense initiative—he will not hesitate to shelve it. Worse, he may weaponize it as part of his larger war against what he calls the “deep state.” The danger, then, is not that he will kill the F/A-XX outright, but that he will instrumentalize it—using it as a bargaining chip in some broader culture war, or as a tool for punishing naval leadership perceived as disloyal.
This is not hypothetical. One need only look at Trump’s past actions—his interference in war crimes trials, his demand for “sexy” warships, his scuttling of Pentagon appointments for reasons more personal than professional—to know that major programs are not immune to presidential caprice. The F/A-XX, as a classified, still-murky, and high-dollar endeavor, is especially vulnerable.
At the same time, the domestic political context offers an opening. With both opposition leaders—Joe Biden and Ron DeSantis—having lost their political platforms (Biden, through defeat; DeSantis, through the spectacular implosion of his own party stature), Trump is operating with fewer constraints than ever before. Congress is weak. The media landscape is fragmented. And the defense-industrial base, long accustomed to proceduralist kabuki, is struggling to adapt to the sheer speed of presidential directives.
In this vacuum, Trump can move swiftly. If he decides that the F/A-XX fits his broader narrative of “dominance,” “sovereignty,” and “rebuilding the military,” he may greenlight rapid development in ways previous presidents never dared. He may ignore bureaucratic risk assessments, override traditional budget timelines, and even mandate a crash program. The result could be a platform that arrives faster than expected—and with more raw potential than anything the Navy has fielded in a generation.
But speed is not strategy. And this is where the F/A-XX debate risks going off the rails. For all its promise, no platform can substitute for clarity of purpose. If the aircraft is conceived as a pure technological hedge—something to put steel in the game and check China’s rise—it will not be enough. It must be embedded in a coherent maritime strategy, one that integrates undersea warfare, space-based targeting, distributed surface action groups, and carrier-based strike aviation into a single warfighting ecosystem. That’s the hard part. And it’s the part no administration, including Trump’s, has yet demonstrated it can deliver.
Nor will the F/A-XX deliver dividends if its procurement becomes another victim of America’s broader malaise: partisan decay, fiscal brinkmanship, and industrial incapacity. We can talk about sixth-generation sensors and manned-unmanned teaming all we want. But unless Congress stabilizes the defense budget, unless the Navy reforms its acquisition culture, and unless the defense industry can actually build what it designs, none of it will matter.
And then there’s the question no one wants to ask: what if Trump doesn’t finish the job? What if the F/A-XX becomes one more of his “incomplete revolutions,” like the border wall or the Space Force—a flashy brand atop a brittle institution? What if, in his second term, the enthusiasm fades, the internal feuds resume, and the priorities shift? In that case, the F/A-XX could suffer the worst fate of all: death by neglect.
Still, there is one reason for cautious optimism. Trump, for all his chaos, has an intuitive understanding of *prestige*. He knows that future-looking, headline-grabbing, American-made defense projects are catnip for his political brand. And unlike many of his predecessors, he is not afraid to centralize authority, cut through interservice squabbling, and impose timelines. If he can be convinced that the F/A-XX is not just a weapon system, but a symbol of national renewal—something akin to Reagan’s “600-ship Navy,” or Kennedy’s moonshot—then he might just drive it forward with the kind of urgency it demands.
But that will require more than PowerPoint slides and guarded Hill briefings. It will require a narrative. Not one rooted in abstract deterrence theory, but in concrete American interests: the defense of allies in the Western Pacific, the safeguarding of maritime trade, and the prevention of peer war through superior force projection. Trump will need to believe that the F/A-XX is not just a tool for the Navy, but a monument to American supremacy.
That’s the tightrope. The Navy must make its case without descending into sycophancy. It must build an air wing worthy of the geopolitical moment without becoming a pawn in Trump’s populist theater. It must do what militaries in liberal democracies rarely do well: innovate during uncertainty, prepare in the absence of consensus, and win the future while everyone else is still fighting the past.
The F/A-XX will not determine the outcome of a future war with China. But its fate will tell us something profound about whether America is still capable of strategic imagination—or whether even its best ideas will be drowned in the noise of domestic dysfunction.
Either way, the clock is ticking. And China isn’t waiting.
Andrew Latham, Ph.D., a tenured professor at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He is also a Senior Washington Fellow with the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy in Ottawa and a non-resident fellow with Defense Priorities, a think tank in Washington, DC
