At the annual Air, Space and Cyber Conference this week, Air Force Gen. David Allen shared a familiar message with an audience of industry representatives, military personnel, and Pentagon civilian employees. “We got to go fast… We’re ready to go fast. We have to go fast.”

He was referring specifically to the F-47, the Air Force’s planned 6^th-generation fighter jet, named in honor of President Trump’s position as the nation’s 47^th president. The Air Force now wants its first flight in 2028—one year earlier than the previous target of early 2029, though FY2026 budget documents indicated the plane’s Engineering and Manufacturing Development (EMD) phase would continue through FY2030. While the acceleration may sound minor, the push for speed has often reflected political considerations rather than sound acquisition practice or military need.

We’ve seen how the push for speed played out with the 5^th-generation fighter. As we detailed in a 2024 report, the sixth-generation fighter is at risk of repeating many of the mistakes that have plagued and continue to plague the F-35 program. One of its most significant mistakes was a high level of concurrency—overlap between the design and production phases of the program.

In 2005, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that only 35 percent of the F-35’s engineering drawing packages were expected to be released by the time of the program’s critical design review. GAO cited a best practice of 90 percent completion of these packages at this stage. As a result, many designs needed to be reworked as problems surfaced, which created significant sustainment challenges. In 2019, GAO found that there were at least 39 different configurations of fielded F-35s. Those sustainment problems in turn drove the F-35’s horrendous full mission capable rates, which as of 2023 languished around 30 percent—far short of program goals.

Pentagon officials under both President Biden and President Trump have acknowledged concurrency as a lesson learned from the F-35, but their remarks fall short of committing to avoid it. Then-Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said in 2023 that there would be some concurrency in the Air Force’s sixth-generation fighter program, but that it would happen “in a rational way, that doesn’t take excessive risk.” More recently, Pentagon acquisition chief Michael Duffy responded to a question during a hearing on acquisition reform about lessons from the F-35 and had this to say about the F-47:

We need to go fast. We want to go fast, but the risk of concurrency in pursuing technologies that are not fully mature yet, trying to incorporate them into weapon system can end up slowing us down. So, I think it’s having the expertise to apply the judgment to find how can we accelerate and how do we need to just slow down a little bit and make sure we’re doing rigorous evaluation of how to deploy mature technologies into systems that doesn’t delay us in the long run.

They say admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery. But it’s not clear that the Pentagon has gotten past that step. While Duffy’s nod to “rigorous evaluation” seems encouraging, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gutted the office responsible for such evaluation earlier this year, cutting staffing levels in the Pentagon’s Office of the Director of Test and Evaluation (ODOT&E) from 82 civilian staff and 12 military personnel to 30 civilians and 15 military personnel. That means far fewer independent eyes looking under the hood to see if the plane is truly ready to fly.

Whether this push to get the first F-47 in the air by 2028 leads to the same kind of delays, cost overruns, and performance shortfalls as the F-35 remains to be seen. But the time to press the Pentagon on these plans is now, not after problems start piling up. As we wrote in our report, policymakers would be wise to take another look at alternatives to sixth-generation fighters before pushing ahead with multiple programs (the Navy wants a 6^th-gen fighter too) that could run up trillion-dollar-plus tabs over their lifecycles. But if the Pentagon is going to buy these planes, Congress should at least make sure it gets the design right on the first go-round by legislating guardrails like design completion and testing requirements. Otherwise, taxpayers could be stuck with yet another generation of fighters that overpromise and underdeliver—a legacy no president would want tied to a plane named in their honor.