This is all part of a larger effort to break the traditional weapons development and procurement mold in order to remain competitive in an era of peer competition from the likes of China and, to some degree, Russia. During his address, Roper went on to note that things have gone beyond the "e-Plane" digital realm for higher-end projects, in particular in regards to the service's ongoing and notably vague Next Generation Air Dominance initiative, stating:
"NGAD right now is designing, assembling, testing, and, in the digital world, exploring things that would have cost us time and money to wait for physical world results… The announcement isn’t that we just built an e-plane and have flown it a lot of times in a virtual world, which we’ve done. But if you think that we don't care about physical-world results, we do. In fact, NGAD has come so far that the full-scale flight demonstrator has already flown in the physical world…It’s a full-scale flight demonstrator..''
MAGA Patriots USA.