Abstract: With artificial intelligent technologies applied and developed in the military field, intelligent warfare becomes a certain tendency in the future. Intelligent warfare has the following traits: the cognition shared and the decision made being more complex, the changes and the evolution being more rapid, and the access and the denial existing in the whole warfare. Therefore, smart morphing aircraft, which match the combat needs in future warfare, becomes an important trend. Smart morphing aircraft is a new way to improve aircraft performance, showing particular research significance and outstanding development potential. It combines different flight profiles effectively and integrates multiple flight capabilities efficiently. It breaks through the existing flight boundaries, achieves expansion both in time and space, and improves the combat capabilities in multi-domain operation. However, achieving smart morphing aircraft design re-quires complicated technologies. The costs of deformation, such as the increased complexity of the machine system, pose challenges to aerodynamic design, flight control, and structural implementation, where the core problem is to achieve the optimal design in each shape under the constraint of multidisciplinary engineering. For now, China has a good technical foundation in morphing technology, but the development of smart morphing aircraft in the future calls for joint efforts promoted by multiple disciplines. With that, smart morphing aircraft could apply the intelligent technolo-gy and the deformation technology together, benefit from fast algorithm upgrades and flexible hardware applications, and introduce new flight modes and new combat capabilities.

Key words: smart morphing aircraft, intelligent warfare, multi-domain operation, aerodynamic design, deformation decision, smart materials