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With the ACCA being designed in 5 months and flown in 20 months from the go-ahead, I would say 5 years is definitely possible.

I wouldn't be surprised if its got a heavy use of composites as well, in order to reduce he number of total parts. For the ACCA, they had 300 structural parts vs 3,000 metallic and 4,000 mechanical fasteners vs 40,000 otherwise.

https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/history/a...

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To be fair, there’s a pretty massive difference in scope between a 50 mil Afrl tech demonstration program and what this would be. If/when this materializes, it’s likely to be a capital A Airforce program worth at least a billion dollars with a goal to produce at least one demonstrator that can be directly followed by LRIP and then IOC probably only a couple years after the demonstrator first flies.

For that level of effort, five years probably isn’t impossible, but it’s definitely unlikely.

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