Oh Lord, look at me and my sixth-generation boner

As regular readers of this blog know, I do like me some advanced fighter aircraft. Of course, I am always happy to support relatively low-tech solutions that work, such as the A-10, but I get kind of excited by news of big advances in fighter aircraft technology.

And so, hot on the heels of the fifth-generation fighters, the F-22 (of which we did not build enough) and the F-35 (which is consistently proving its critics to be just fucking wrong) we are apparently hard at work (as we should be) on a sixth-generation fighter:

The Air Force has begun experimenting and conceptual planning for a 6th generation fighter aircraft to emerge in coming years as a technological step beyond the F-35, service leaders said.
"We have started experimentation, developmental planning and technology investment," Lt. Gen. Arnold Bunch, Military Deputy, Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, Acquisition, told Scout Warrior in an interview earlier this year.
The new aircraft, engineered to succeed the 5th-generation F-35 Joint StrikeFighter and explode onto the scene by the mid 2030s, is now in the earliest stages of conceptual development with the Air Force and Navy. The two services are now working together on early conceptual discussions about the types of technologies and capabilities the aircraft will contain ... [w]hile the Air Force has not yet identified a platform for the new aircraft.

Keep in  mind, no other nation has successfully fielded a fifth-generation fighter. The Chinese and the Russians both purport to have one in development, but neither is in production, both appear to have huge problems and neither has the full spectrum of features that make, for instance, the F-35 such an effective fifth-generation fighter. Avionics, communication and networking are at least as important in a fifth-generation fighter as performance. The game is no longer about dog-fighting ability. If you get down to that, the F-16 and the Russian Su-27 (and its descendants) will kick ass every time. The game now is about killing the enemy from a distance, in large numbers, before they even know you are there.

After all, if you are going to kill large numbers of highly trained fighter pilots you've never met, you should at least be efficient about it. There is a whole bunch about what the services hope to achieve with sixth-generation fighters at the link. I'm pretty excited.