You only had to walk into the exhibit hall at last week’s Air & Space Forces Association (AFA) convention in Maryland to realise that US air power is having a moment.
A prime spot to the left of the entrance was occupied by the company Anduril. Now in its second year as an exhibitor, the startup’s exhibit was as large as any of the major defence companies. Anduril’s 32-year-old co-founder, Palmer Luckey, made his first billions from a gaming accessory, enjoys Twitter catfights and regards Hawaiian shirts as business attire.
That might seem far removed from Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall’s commissioning of the bluest of blue-ribbon panels to rebuild the service’s modernisation plans. Members include three 21st century US Air Force chiefs of staff (John Jumper, Norton Schwartz and Steve Goldfein) but also General Joe Ralston, Paul Kaminski and Natalie Crawford—some of the people who steered the USAF’s adoption of stealth more than 40 years ago.
But Anduril, Luckey and Kendall’s council of elders could not be more closely interconnected. Their linkage was represented on the AFA show floor by two full-size aeroplane models and one real aircraft. The models represented designs that Anduril and General Atomics were selected to build in April for the air force’s program for collaborative combat aircraft (CCAs)—small, fighter-like uncrewed aeroplanes that would fly with and support piloted fighters. (Such aircraft were formerly called ‘loyal wingmen’.) The real aircraft on the show floor was General Atomics’ XQ-67A prototype, also uncrewed.
CCAs are the disruptive agent in USAF force planning, which has invested heavily in a structure that risks being overmatched in the Western Pacific. The expansion of Chinese counter-air forces—fighters, missiles, airborne radars and air-warfare ships—presents more threats than the projected US force can handle, regardless of quality or training.
Hence the watchwords for the CCA effort are ‘speed’ and ‘affordable mass’—the ability to generate credible threats for Chinese forces at a fraction of the cost of crewed aircraft and to start fielding in numbers by the late 2020s.
CCAs are part of the USAF’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program and are much of the reason why the manned element of NGAD is being rescoped under the guidance of Kendall’s expert panel. What was probably a large, exquisite and enormously expensive fighter concept has been scrapped. One reason: crewed fighter designed to operate with CCAs is not the same as one that fights without them and might be smaller and cheaper.
This presents a host of challenges and choices that must be addressed in short order. The Anduril and General Atomics aircraft—conventional high-subsonic aircraft, about the size of small jet trainers—are test platforms, as are the Boeing Ghost Bat in Australia and the Northrop Grumman Model 437 Vanguard in the US. They are designed to allow live evaluations of CCA concepts of operations (conops) to determine how the crewless aircraft will be controlled and operated alongside current and future combat aircraft and support assets.
A good deal of wargaming and simulation is being done. USAF Materiel Command chief General Duke Richardson, speaking at the convention, pointed to the value of the Joint Simulation Environment, a complex virtual battlespace developed to support the F-35, as a tool for virtual prototyping.
What emerges from wargaming (including a 2023 AFA Mitchell Institute game for which I was a lead author) is that adding capable uncrewed aircraft en masse to the force changes everything. For example, if CCAs are sufficiently cheap and if enough are available, the risk calculus changes dramatically. Major General Joe Kunkel, director of wargaming at USAF headquarters, summed up how a CCA could be treated: ‘We send it off and say, “good luck, little buddy”.’
For Increment 1 of the CCA program, the USAF selected General Atomics as an experienced uncrewed-aircraft contractor—after 20 years of production, it is hardly an upstart—and Anduril, the new kid.
Anduril has been putting in a lot of conops work over privately owned land, with a fleet of manned surrogate aircraft. The vice president of Anduril’s air dominance and strike division, Jason Levin, pointed to work that went well beyond the aircraft’s outer mould line. The company’s philosophy is that ‘people should not have to interact with the aircraft in order to turn it around’, meaning pre- and post-flight checks on the ground should be automated.
General Atomics Aeronautical Systems president Dave Alexander, meanwhile, argued the need to ‘get rid of scheduled maintenance, and design it so you don’t touch it in the field’—pointing to one aircraft from the company that had logged 7000 flying hours in a year.
For the USAF, the purpose of early Increments in the CCA effort is to evaluate conops and tactics. Increment 1 will be aimed at air-to-air combat, Kunkel said, describing the CCA in that role as ‘a missile truck’ with ‘the greatest impact and speed to field.’ In the AFA’s wargame, mission planners sent CCAs armed with Amraam air-to-air missiles ahead of crewed aircraft, accepting increased risk but permitting closer, faster and more lethal missile engagements.
Increment 2 CCAs will be designed to support electronic attack and demonstrate a ‘resilient sensing grid’, according to Kunkel, together with an expanded weapon suite.
The second batch will evaluate ‘different styles of sustainment, and different modes of take-off and landing’. An emerging requirement is to operate CCAs in small, disaggregated units in the first island chain (from Japan to Indonesia) using shorter or improvised runways substantially shorter than the 8000-foot (2400-metre) military standard. This reduces the range requirement for the CCA, shortens response time and potentially increases sortie rates, but will require mobility, camouflage, concealment, deception and air defence to survive Chinese attacks.
Work on subsystems and even weapons is proceeding in parallel with the airframes. Raytheon showed mock-ups of small, light, air-cooled multifunction radio-frequency arrays, together with a small air-to-air missile. Named Peregrine, the missile is designed to occupy half as much space as an AIM-120 and is the outcome of 10 years of work in collaboration with the USAF. Anduril showed its Iris infra-red search and track (IRST) system, based on a long-wave staring array. Highly applicable to an air-to-air CCA, Iris is being pitched now for adversary training aircraft, given that almost all new Chinese fighters have IRSTs.
Engines are attracting attention. Efficient turbofans in the suitable category of 3,000 to 5,000 pounds (13 to 22 kilonewtons) of thrust exist, but they cost in the low millions each, a price the CCA model cannot support. GE Aerospace has teamed with new arrival Kratos to develop a family of engines combining GE’s technology with the smaller company’s experience in short-life, low-cost engines. Although the initial GEK800 product has less than 1000 pounds of thrust, the team has its sights on CCA.
The advent of CCAs and planned changes to NGAD came as a shock to the industry, against a background of contentious politics and rising world tension. Upstart companies add more uncertainty to the mix. But Kendall and senior Pentagon leaders seem to have made up their minds that the hour of the unmanned combat aircraft is upon us. Let’s hope they haven’t got it wrong.