A unit charged with exploring how the U.S. Air Force will utilize its future Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) is now set to get actual examples of the drones to experiment with. This comes as the service’s CCA plans continue to evolve, now in part because of serious concerns about budgetary shortfalls on the horizon.
Andrew Hunter, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology & Logistics, announced the additional Increment 1 CCA purchases at Defense One’s State of Defense Business event on Nov. 13. The CCA program is currently expected to include at least two iterative development cycles, or increments. Anduril and General Atomics are presently developing separate designs as part of the first increment, both of which are expected to fly for the first time next year. The Air Force expects to kick off a competition for Increment 2 sometime in Fiscal Year 2025, which began on Oct. 1. The CCA program also encompasses a variety of other related work, including on autonomous technologies.
“One thing that I recently did was approve some additional CCA purchases to equip the Experimental Operations Unit [EOU] in order to enable that experimentation to happen using real assets,” Hunter said last week, according to Defense One.
The Air Force first announced plans for the EOU last year and is now in the process of establishing it at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. The unit is tasked with crafting new tactics, techniques, and procedures for employing CCAs, as well as exploring how those drones will be incorporated into the Air Force’s overall force structure and helping to build trust in the autonomy algorithms that will underpin their operations.
Various organizations within the Air Force have already been using a variety of crewed and uncrewed aircraft to help lay the groundwork for the introduction of CCAs, as well as support other advanced drone and autonomy research and development and test and evaluation efforts. This includes the General Atomics XQ-67A Off-Board Sensing Station (OBSS) drone, from which that company’s CCA design is derived.
In his remarks last week, Hunter did not say how many additional CCAs, or what types specifically, the Air Force now plans to purchase for the EOU. Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall and Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin have said in the past that the service intends to acquire between 100 and 150 Increment 1 types, at least. It remains unclear whether or not Anduril’s and General Atomics’ designs might both ultimately enter production.
“The additional buy for the Air Force helps ensure that warfighters will have ample opportunity for experimentation to support operational fielding before the end of the decade,” Diem Salmon, Vice President of Air Dominance and Strike at Anduril, did say in a statement in response to Hunter’s remarks, per Aviation Week.
“Supplying them with actual CCAs is an important step to that,” C. Mark Brinkley, a General Atomics spokesperson, also told Defense One, referring to the EOU’s expected work. “We’re happy to support them in any way.”
Air Force Col. Timothy Helfrich separately disclosed that both Increment 1 CCA designs had passed their critical design review during a panel discussion at the inaugural Airpower Futures Forum hosted by the Air & Space Forces Association’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies on Nov. 13. Helfrich is currently the Senior Materiel Leader for the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center’s Advanced Aircraft Division.
Much about how the Air Force plans to field and operate its initial CCAs, and what capabilities mix the drones will need as a result, remains murky. The service has said in the past that it expects Increment 1 types to primarily be ‘missile trucks’ flying in close coordination with crewed combat jets, at least initially. Electronic warfare and Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) missions have also been put forward as possible tasks for the initial tranche of the drones.
The video below from Collins Aerospace presents one notional vision for how CCAs might operate together with crewed aircraft, at least initially.
“I think it’s a little too early to say whether or not we’re going to do Increment 1B or 1C. We’ll have to learn as Increment 1 rolls out and as Increment 2 rolls out, but we do expect them to be complementary,” Helfrich said last week, according to Air & Space Forces Magazine. “I do expect that there will be a time where we have a mixture of Increment 1s and Increment 2s; [and] maybe Increment 3 out there.”
In addition, “no one should think that Increment 2 means ‘Increment 1 plus.’ … That doesn’t mean that Increment 2 has more capability,” he added, per DefenseScoop. “We’re still looking to figure out whether the right balance — if you’re doing the analysis — is to further bring down the capability to maximize a low cost, or is it that I need to change what the focus is from a missile truck to something else.”
“If we are to continue to add capability and gold plate things, we’re going to miss out on our costs and most importantly our schedule targets. And so making some of those tough trades,” he further noted, Defense One reported. “To say this is good enough and moving on has been a challenge, because we want a lot, but we are making those decisions.”
In addition, at last week’s panel discussion, Helfrich highlighted how CCAs are expected to be transformational and that the questions that need to be answered go well beyond just what the drones will do in a combat context. How and where they will operate from, especially on a day-to-day basis domestically within the United States, where there are significant restrictions on fully uncrewed flight activity, are still major unknowns. Other questions about basing and forward deployment, for combat and non-combat missions, as well as what units they will be assigned to persist. Ensuring artificial intelligence-driven autonomous capabilities work as intended and, perhaps more importantly, that operators trust it, are still major hurdles to be overcome.
New CCA tactics, techniques, and procedures will also have to account for equally new training, maintenance, and logistics requirements that will be fundamentally different from those required to support crewed aircraft operations. CCAs may have very short service lives overall compared to traditional crewed aircraft.
All of this is exactly why the Air Force is standing up the EOU and is somewhat curious that the original plan for this central experimentation force does not appear to have included assigning it actual CCAs. Much can be done using surrogates and high-fidelity simulations, but the new drones are expected to lead to so many changes that it is hard to see how having at least a handful of real examples would not just be valuable, but essential.
Fears about at best flat defense budgets in the coming years and the growing costs of various priority modernization efforts have also emerged as another key factor in the Air Force’s still-evolving CCA plans, especially when it comes to Increment 2. Kendall and others have said that Increment 2’s requirements will be directly intertwined with other decisions about how to move forward with the acquisition (or not) of a new sixth-generation crewed stealth combat jet and a Next Generation Air-refueling System (NGAS) family of capabilities that could include a new stealth tanker. The sixth-generation fighter effort, which is currently undergoing a deep review, and the CCA program are both part of the larger Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) initiative.
“The variable that concerns me most as we go through this analysis and produce a range of alternatives is going to be [the availability of adequate resources.] … to pursue any combination of those new designs,” Kendall said, referring to the NGAD combat jet, CCA drones, and NGAS, in a keynote address at the Airlift/Tanker Association’s (ATA) annual symposium, on Nov. 1.
Kendall and other service officials have repeatedly stressed that the Air Force is committed to acquiring a mixture of future capabilities to ensure it will able to dominate in the air combat arena going forward. The service has also continuously pushed back on assertions that the CCA program’s Increment 1 will produce an experimental rather than operational force. The stated goal is still for the first operational CCAs to begin entering service before the end of the decade.
The work of the EOU, together now with an assigned force of CCAs, only looks set to be more critical as the Air Force continues to refine its plans for drones as part of a larger and still-evolving future air power ecosystem.
Contact the author: joe@twz.com