The U.S. Department of the Air Force has awarded Boeing a contract for 22 F-15EX Eagle II fighters under Lot 7, keeping all planned aircraft in the batch within the funding Congress provided through budget reconciliation, the service stated.
The contract was finalised before the end of the fiscal year on 30 September, following negotiations between the F-15 Program Office and Boeing that the Air Force described as focused and complex. According to the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center’s Fighters and Advanced Aircraft Directorate, the agreement takes account of the effects of the 2025 production disruption and wider inflation across the defence industrial base. That disruption was the strike by around 3,200 International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers members at Boeing’s St. Louis-area plants, which began in August 2025 and halted work on the company’s military aircraft lines for around three months.
Brig. Gen. Timothy Helfrich, portfolio acquisition executive for the directorate, said in the release: “Lot 7 reflects a disciplined approach to executing available resources while balancing the realities affecting defense production.” He added: “The team remained focused on affordability, production continuity and delivering the aircraft needed to modernize the U.S. Air Force’s fighter fleet for the threats we face today and into the future.”
The reconciliation funding referenced by the Air Force came through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed in July 2025, which included tens of billions of dollars for defence procurement on top of regular appropriations. The service said the negotiation team worked across programme management, contracting, pricing, engineering, financial management and logistics to assess the impact of changing production conditions and align the aircraft buy with the money available.
The F-15EX is a two-seat-capable development of the F-15 family, derived from the Advanced Eagle variants Boeing built for export customers such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia. It features a fly-by-wire flight control system, large-area cockpit displays, the Eagle Passive/Active Warning Survivability System electronic warfare suite and an open mission systems architecture. The Air Force intends the aircraft to replace its ageing F-15C and F-15D fleet, and the Oregon Air National Guard’s 142nd Wing at Portland became the first operational unit to receive the type. The service’s planned total has shifted over the life of the programme, falling from 144 to 98 aircraft in the fiscal 2025 budget request.
The Air Force also presented the award as an example of the Secretary of War’s acquisition transformation principles, saying an integrated negotiation team was empowered to elevate issues needing senior-level decisions while keeping accountability for cost, schedule and aircraft numbers.
Col. Jonathan Varoli, system program manager of the F-15 Program Office, was quoted in the release as saying: “The Lot 7 award demonstrates what is possible when the acquisition enterprise moves with purpose, remains accountable to the taxpayer and stays focused on delivering capability to the warfighter.” He continued: “This effort brought together the right expertise, at the right time, to achieve an outcome that strengthens the F-15EX program and supports the future fighter force.”
According to the service, the award sustains near-term production of the F-15EX while the Air Force continues to assess its future requirements and acquisition strategy for the aircraft.
With America buying more F15s and European nations also building up numbers of Typhoons, etc, how can the UK reasonably justify in not buying more Typhoons? Another 24 would be a major uplift to the RAF as well as supporting British industry. It also has the advantage of further reducing our dependence on the US.
For the answer to that question see our PR PMs recent confirmation of why we can’t just increase defence spending. Or ,i f you want me to put it succinctly, we need that money – for benefits.
I’ll preface this by saying I agree that the RAF should be getting more Typhoons, BUT there are some fairly strong reasons why they’re not currently planning to.
The first is the biggest and ultimately decisive one – money. The US has a monstrous defence budget and a military-industrial complex that makes it possible to support multiple competing aerospace companies. Lockheed Martin has been dominant in the fighter space for a long time, but buying upgraded Eagles keeps Boeing alive as a competitor, with the lovely side benefit of keeping a production line open to export less capable but still American kit to less trustworthy but still friendly nations.
In contrast, we only have BAE with the scale and expertise to compete at that level. There is no competitor to support, and BAE have the work on Tempest to keep them paid up and busy. Speaking of Tempest, funding a significant Typhoon purchase would likely draw limited funding away from it’s replacement; 24 Typhoons would likely cost north of £2.5b, which is a huge sum that could be spent on a huge variety of things, but would probably have to come from the RAF budget allocation.
That brings me neatly to the second point – the UK is currently stealing a march on most of Europe and the US on the next generation of fighters. FCAS is currently dead, GCAP includes 3 of the big export customers for US 5th-gen aircraft, and the EU nations are likely to favour buying or potentially locally producing Tempest over buying the F-47. There is a very real chance that Tempest, done right and in service ASAP, could become NATO’s future standard fighter.
During the Blue Circle Fighter fiasco, the US offered the UK a wing of F-15A’s that were being replaced in USAFE by F-15Cs for a $1. We snootily rejected them as ‘obsolete’ – we’d wait for our Typhoon F2 wunderwaffe.
40 years later – the Israeli Air Force F-16A’s are still mixing it with any fighters they meet and bombing the crap out of countries defended by modern SAM networks and doing the business.
The Blue Circle Fighter? Long scrapped and the Eagle is still a top fighter.
Good designs stand the test of time.
In the age of 6th Gen steath these are still good weapons platforms, only caveat is: you have to depend on the stealthy aircraft to do the SEAD/DEAD
beforehand. But once that is done, you can send in the F15s to complete the mission using cheaper, more plentiful ordinance