The Air Force landed two F-35A fighters on a highway in Finland on Wednesday to practice how aircraft might operate in a high-intensity future war.

The F-35s, which were from the 48th Fighter Wing at RAF Lakenheath in England, carried out the landings on the Hosio Highway Strip in Ranua, Finland, under the so-called agile combat employment, or ACE, concept. It was the first time the Air Force had landed its F-35s on a highway, the service said.

The Air Force worries that if war breaks out with an adversary boasting stand-off weaponry, like China, their military could target large American bases in places like Japan and Guam with missile barrages or other attacks. If the Air Force only operated from those bases, a series of those Chinese attacks could potentially devastate its ability to launch aircraft.

The service developed the ACE concept to counter that possibility. The Air Force plans to spread out operations across a given region in “hub and spoke” patterns, using a series of smaller, more austere bases. By dispersing these operations, the Air Force says, enemy forces would have to carry out many more attacks than if they were centralized.

Under ACE, the Air Force could create rough air fields for their distributed bases, or use existing local highways as runways.

The Air Force said the highway landings, which took place during the BAANA 2024 exercise in Finland, showed how NATO allies had improved their ability to work together, and operate under ACE tenets.

“The successful first-ever landing of our fifth-generation F-35 on a highway in Europe is a testament to the growing relationship and close interoperability we have with our Finnish allies,” Gen. James Hecker, commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe-Air Forces Africa, said. “The opportunity to learn from our Finnish counterparts improves our ability to rapidly deploy and employ airpower from unconventional locations and reflects the collective readiness and the agility of our forces.”

Finland and other Nordic nations have military-civilian integration, like warplanes using highways, baked into their national defense calculus.

Allied aircraft that also practiced highway landings included a German Eurofighter Typhoon and a Finnish Hawk jet trainer.

Finland formally joined NATO in 2023, spurred largely by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Air Force said Finland’s membership has increased U.S. airmen’s ability to train with Finnish airmen and learn from them, at events such as the 1v1 air superiority exercise held in June at Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

The Air Force is rethinking its approach to how it will fight a future air war as it considers a new path forward for its Next Generation Air Dominance fighter system, top officials said Wednesday.

And the revamping of NGAD and the air superiority concept could open up more opportunities to smaller and non-traditional firms to compete for elements of the Air Force’s next fighter, officials said.

Major prime contractors in the aerospace world bring vast and unique experience that will be needed for a redesigned Next Generation Air Dominance family of systems, Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Jim Slife said at the Defense News Conference in Arlington, Virginia, Wednesday. Those primes have already done considerable work on a future fighter system that must be leveraged, Slife said.

But “niche capabilities” that smaller firms specialize in will also be vital to creating “whatever NGAD turns into,” Slife said.

“There are absolutely parts of whatever this mission engineering that we do, for this [air superiority] space, that will open the door to non-traditional contractors as well as the major primes,” Slife said. “It’s a yes-and.”

The Air Force put its years-in-the-works NGAD effort, which had originally been expected to award a contract this year, on hold this summer. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said in a June interview that NGAD was on track to cost about three times as much as an F-35, placing its potential price tag at as much as $300 million apiece. At that cost, the Air Force would only have been able to buy a small NGAD fleet.

Kendall said the Air Force planned to redesign NGAD to bring its costs down and better integrate its planned drone wingmen, which the service calls Collaborative Combat Aircraft.

At Wednesday’s conference, Slife said the Air Force is conducting a wholesale rethinking of how it will achieve air superiority against a major adversary such as China as it reconsiders its way forward with NGAD.

“You get two different answers if you frame the question as, ‘How do we achieve air superiority in a contested environment?’ [versus] ‘How do we build a 6th-gen manned fighter platform?’” Slife said. “Those are not necessarily the same question.”

Since the Air Force drew up its original ideas for NGAD, Slife said, technology has advanced much quicker than anticipated. Concepts such as autonomously-flown drone wingmen are now within the Air Force’s reach, and the service wants to better fold those capabilities into NGAD.

And with those advancements in technology, Slife said, nothing is off the table.

“There are capabilities that we [now] have that perhaps we would want to be part of this mission space going forward, that weren’t baked into where we started with the NGAD system,” Slife said. “I wouldn’t rule anything out, but I also wouldn’t rule anything back in.”

The Air Force’s recent experience with NGAD shows the importance of flexibility in major acquisitions as the threat evolves, Hunter said.

“It definitely prioritizes towards … not being over-specified for any particular problem set, or any particular approach to the problem set,” Hunter said.

When asked if a revised NGAD contract might come in 2025, Hunter said, “We’ll have to wait and see what our analysis delivers.”

The U.S. Air Force “underestimated” the complexity of building a sprawling network of launch centers and other ground infrastructure for its next nuclear missile, which led to severe projected cost overruns, the service’s acquisition chief said Wednesday.

Most of the Air Force’s and industry’s attention was initially focused on the missile portion of the LGM-35A Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile, and the program “really neglected the complexity of the ground infrastructure,” Andrew Hunter, the Air Force’s assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, said at the Defense News Conference in Arlington, Virginia, on Wednesday.

The Air Force wants to replace its arsenal of roughly 450 aging Minuteman III nuclear missiles, which are nearing the end of its life, with the Northrop Grumman-made Sentinel. But the projected future costs of Sentinel’s infrastructure — which include building new launch control centers across the Plains region, refurbishing existing silos for the new missiles and replacing about 7,500 miles of copper cable connecting the facilities with modern fiber optics — have skyrocketed.

The Pentagon originally expected to spend $77.7 billion on Sentinel, but the program is now likely to cost about $160 billion if it stays on its current course. The projected cost overruns alarmed lawmakers and Pentagon officials and incurred a process known as a critical Nunn-McCurdy breach.

After a review announced in July, the military decided Sentinel was too important to cancel but must be restructured to bring those costs back down. But the Pentagon said even a “reasonably modified” version would still probably cost $140.9 billion, or 81% more than the original estimate.

The Air Force is now going “line by line” through Sentinel’s requirements to look for places to bring its costs down, Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Jim Slife said, and the “exhaustive” process will take months.

“The undersecretary (Melissa Dalton), Mr. Hunter’s team and I are deeply, deeply involved in looking at our requirements (and) making sure that we revalidate all the requirements,” Slife said. The Air Force needs to “trace every single one of them back to either presidential guidance, or departmental guidance for things like safety, security, surety, survivability — all the things that you would want in a system that you’re going to rely on to keep the nation safe,” Slife said.

Finding places to cut costs is challenging, Slife said. Sentinel’s top-level requirements — the big-picture blueprint of what it needs to do — were fairly straightforward, he said.

But the “derived requirements” that spell out how Sentinel will do its job “actually can become problematic,” he said. Those can include spelling out how many facilities will be needed to carry out Sentinel’s mission and how much concrete those facilities will need to build and how large a workforce they will require, Slife said.

The Air Force has not built a new ICBM and accompanying infrastructure since the Minuteman III, which was deployed in the early 1970s.

And because it has been so long since the Air Force undertook a major acquisition of this scale, Hunter said, the Air Force underestimated Sentinel’s complexity.

“We’re having to relearn some of those skills and up our game,” Hunter said.

That “striking” complexity of Sentinel’s ground infrastructure is crucial to making the ICBM system an effective nuclear deterrent, Hunter said.

“We have to have a missile where we can respond instantly, at all times, without fail, and in the context of the highest of high-intensity conflicts, a potential nuclear exchange,” Hunter said. “And we ask our ground infrastructure to provide most of those capabilities. The missile is only a small piece of that puzzle.”

The Air Force also has to “bring a lot more engineering focus on the ground infrastructure” to simplify Sentinel and bring its costs under control, Hunter said.