Right now it takes the U.S. Air Force around 20 years to develop a new fighter plane. Will Roper, the flying branch’s assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, thinks that’s a bad idea. And he has a plan to change it.

Instead of spending a generation investing hundreds of billions of dollars into a single fighter design, Roper wants to buy very small quantities of new planes -- and do it fast. He calls it “micro-production.”

“Multiple companies designing and building concurrently, with different technologies and not designing ‘X’ planes but aircraft that could be produced in quantity—if the nation needs them—and flown by any pilot in the Air Force without specialized training,” Roper told Air Force Magazine reporter John Tirpak. “That’s the core idea. We hope for radically different results in terms of quality, and to keep quantities low until we need quantity in bulk.

“The idea,” Roper added, “is not about building aircraft that are different, but about building aircraft differently. The key tenet is a new ‘holy trinity’ of technologies that would flip the pace of building new things and the price we pay for them. That trinity is: agile software development—no surprises, there—modular, open-systems architecture—because we want to be able to change out components quickly and seamlessly—and, finally, digital engineering, which is the new element.”

We’re accustomed to doing things digitally in the Air Force. Flight simulators, for example, help pilots get proficient faster than just flying. It’s cheaper to do it that way, as well.

Digital engineering brings that same idea into design, production and sustainment. It brings a high level of fidelity, and not just in the design of the aircraft. It’s the assembly line, where people are doing work; what work is being done; the machines that do the work; the tooling. … All digitally modeled, so you can optimize it.

You can get expensive tooling out if you can find a better substitute. You can change a process from requiring an artisan with years of training to one requiring a lower skill level. The idea is to find a better way of assembling things, and raise the learning curve in the digital space, before you ever build the first aircraft.

The consequences could be dire if the Air Force doesn’t change the way it builds airplanes. Aircraft steadily have become more expensive while overall military budgets have flattened, meaning the Air Force can afford fewer and fewer planes and takes longer to build them. That drives manufacturers out of the business of building fighters.

“We have to try something different, because we have so few major acquisition programs that it has shrunk the industrial base for tactical aircraft down to two or three companies that can do it,” Roper explained. “We have to change the paradigm so there’s profit in design, and not ask companies to buy into a program, and hope to make their investment back in production and sustainment of a large number of things.”

“If we don’t change that, we’re in danger of collapsing to a single national fighter company, and that is not where we want to be.”

Roper’s plan is to encourage companies to use digital engineering, rapid software-development and modular design quickly to develop a new fighter that meets an immediate military need. The Pentagon would pay a premium for the design then contract out small-batch production to multiple firms. The process soon would repeat.

“We want to give profit in design, keep production rates low, never go to ‘full rate’ production, not buy hundreds or thousands of things so that we can keep upgrading and modernizing, and re-competing who builds the next aircraft every few years,” Roper said.

“If we do this well, and digital tools become common industry practice, you don’t have to be a producer of thousands to be a competitor. You can be a competitor as a great design company. And if this sounds like science fiction, it’s already happened in the automotive industry.”

“If we do it, we can start building cutting-edge aircraft every few years.

David Axe serves as Defense Editor of the National Interest. He is the author of the graphic novels  War Fix, War Is Boring and Machete Squad.