The Air Force last year awarded contracts worth nearly $1 billion each to aircraft manufacturers Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to work on prototyping NGAD engines and to do some airframe work. It will be either Boeing or Lockheed as Northrop Grumman has said they will not continue NGAD. Grumman will focus on the Navy F-A/XX 6th gen fighter.

The fourth generation fighters (F15, F16, F18s) and old bombers (B-52 and B1B) have performed almost all of the fighting for the US for the past four decades. The F-22 and F-35 have barely performed any actual combat missions. The roughly 200 F-22s had one mission which was to shoot down the recent China spy balloon. The fourth generation planes have had thousands of missions in the first Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq war and in the many years of the Iraq and Afghanistan operations. The F117 had some usage in Panama, Kosovo war and in the Gulf war.