Northrop Grumman (Stand CD01) offered reporters a glimpse of the future of military aircraft last month during a whirlwind tour of its manufacturing sites in California. Among the design drivers will be directed-energy lasers, “cyber resiliency” and values-based “cognitive automation,” the company believes.

“We are working very hard on behalf of the nation to produce some really leading-edge capabilities,” said Tom Vice, president of Northrop Grumman aerospace systems. With innovations the company is developing in-house, the Pentagon “doesn’t need to go to Silicon Valley,” he declared. “We’re doing a lot of these things right here.”

Due to the timing of the visit in mid-January, Northrop Grumman would not discuss in detail two major new platforms it is developing for the U.S. Air Force–the Long Range Strike-Bomber (LRS-B) program that it was awarded in October, since held up over a protest by Boeing and Lockheed Martin; and the still-to-be-awarded T-X advanced jet trainer.

The company announced last February that it plans to compete for the T-X program with a clean-sheet design. Its subsidiary, the famed aircraft design house Scaled Composites, is building the demonstrator at its base in the desert town of Mojave, Calif., where the company-hosted press trip stopped for a quick briefing, but was not shown the aircraft.

“We’re trying to hold on to the uniqueness of that design,” Vice explained later during a roundtable discussion at the company’s site in Palmdale, California, where it builds F-35 center fuselages, assembles RQ-4 Global Hawks and services the B-2 stealth bomber. But Northrop Grumman will likely fly the new aircraft in the first half of the year, he added. Scaled Composites also planned to roll out the twin-fuselage Stratolaunch rocket carrier, which promises to be enormous when it emerges from its hangar.

Instead of discussing specific programs, Northrop Grumman touted its focus on basic research, hiring graduates from top research universities and exploring cutting-edge fields like nanophotonics, metamaterials and quantum computing as well as the natural science of biology. Its emphasis on system fundamentals begins with integrated circuits.

In October 2014, the company’s advanced microelectronics foundry in Redondo Beach, California, was recognized for developing the world’s fastest integrated circuit amplifier–one that operates at one terahertz, or one trillion cycles per second–as part of a project sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The foundry specializes in fabricating microelectronics using advanced semiconductor materials including indium phosphide and gallium arsenide. The terahertz chip could be applied in high-resolution imaging systems, high-capacity communications systems, collision avoidance radar and spectrometers, according to DARPA.

“[We’re] building the next generation of semiconductors in a trusted foundry where our nation knows where that actually started, how it was started, what the pedigree is,” Vice said. “These kinds of advanced microelectronics are what makes many of these advanced [aircraft] systems do what they do, because we start with the chip.”

Sixth Gen Fighter

Some of the technologies the company is exploring will likely find their way onto the LRS-B, assuming Northrop Grumman keeps the Air Force contract, or on a future sixth-generation fighter, already the subject of “significant trade studies,” according to senior vice president for research, technology and advanced design Chris Hernandez. Though it is too early to say with certainty, the sixth-generation fighter entering service in the 2030s may have supersonic speed, but it will focus on excelling in range and endurance rather than speed and maneuverability, he said.

Northrop Grumman also envisions the sixth generation fighter hosting a directed-energy laser. The company demonstrated a megawatt-class chemical oxygen iodine laser on the U.S. Missile Defense Agency’s Boeing 747-based Airborne Laser testbed, but chemical lasers must be large and correspondingly costly if they are to generate high power, Vice said. So Northrop Grumman is studying combinations of optical fiber lasers and techniques for beam forming and beam combining. “A big area” for the company is managing heat loss from lasers–the most efficient lasers are only around 35 percent efficient in terms of laser output, with the rest of the energy converted to heat.

“How do we think about a high-powered laser weapons system sitting on a supersonic airplane? Everything wants to generate heat, and today’s answers to heat management are insufficient,” said Vice. “We’re spending an enormous amount of time thinking about harnessing heat and reusing that heat in very innovative ways in the future.”

With the amount of data that it will be expected to collect and integrate, or “fuse,” into actionable information and share with other military platforms, the sixth-generation fighter will have to be invulnerable to cyber attacks. Vice described this need for “cyber-resiliency” in biological terms. “The system of 2030 will have a digital version of a white-blood-cell system that is able to inoculate the inside of that system to prevent it from being attacked and harmed,” he said. This will be “absolutely a requirement for the next generation fighter.”

A recurring topic during the press trip was “cognitive automation,” a capability that Northrop Grumman wants to imbue in its present and future unmanned aircraft platforms. Notably, the capability would be values-based; it would be “autonomy with a conscience,” in Hernandez’s words. Machines would learn and adapt and make judgments–and here, too, the research is inspired by biological processes.

“We’re now bringing the ability for these systems to be cognitive, which requires an intense amount of new efforts around a number of new fields–processing power, neuromorphics, neurosynaptic chips,” Vice explained. “If you provide the ability for the system itself to have judgment, you must also provide the system with the ability to make that judgment within the context of American values, and that is really hard.”