The United States of America has led the world in military aviation since the very inception of the concept. And with advanced new fighter and bomber platforms under development in programs like the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) and the B-21 Raider, America appears to be extending its technological lead in the airpower realm, incorporating a wide variety of new technologies into the next generation of tactical jets.
Military aviation, like aviation as a whole, has always been a matter of compounding technologies from all around the world. In many ways, America’s frequent breakthroughs in the realm of airpower can be credited to the nation’s adoption and understanding of that concept—embracing good ideas regardless of where they come from, even if those ideas have yet to be embraced by the nation they were born in. America’s early stealth efforts, for instance, were built upon academic assertions made by a Soviet physicist named Pyotr Ufimtsev as early as 1962.
So, while this is a list of notable American firsts, we should always remember that military technology is never developed in a vacuum. Every new defense program is informed by the efforts that came before it and the current state of oppositional powers, making technological advancement something of an ongoing conversation.
