The fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would remove cost caps proposed by the House Armed Services Committee for Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), according to an agreement between House and Senate conferees.
Section 224 of the conference report “would remove the requirement for establishing cost caps for CCAs specifically labeled as attritable, expendable, or exquisite.”
“The conferees recognize that the secretary of the Air Force and the secretary of the Navy instead intend that their CCA programs pursue a CCA aircraft designated with the ‘Increment 1’ nomenclature,” the report said. “The conferees agree that CCAs, procured affordably with reasonably defined capability requirements, fielded in sufficient capacity, based on thoroughly considered analysis and successfully demonstrated concepts of operations and employment beforehand, have the potential to significantly increase the lethality of existing tactical fighter aircraft. Unfortunately, neither the secretary of the Air Force nor the secretary of the Navy has sufficiently explained to the congressional defense committees: how the departments can acquire the vehicles affordably in sufficient numbers to execute the concept of operations; or how the program is being defined to apply to challenges in the near-, mid-, and long-terms, particularly as it relates to unpiloted CCA capabilities that may be used in either an attritable or expendable mission taskings.”
The conference report directs the Air Force and Navy to submit separate reports by May 1 next year to the congressional defense committees on “how CCA affordability is being defined and applied for unpiloted aircraft that may be used for either attritable or expendable mission taskings.”
The HASC version of the bill would have divided CCAs into three categories–an up to $3 million “expendable” CCA, an up to $10 million attritable CCA that can be an “occasional combat loss,” and “exquisite”–a multiple sortie, up to $25 million drone “not considered an acceptable combat loss.”
The HASC low-end unit cost for CCA is less than half that of low-quantity buys of the $6.5 million Kratos [KTOS] XQ-58A Valkyrie, while HASC’s high-end $25 million CCA is significantly lower than the $32.5 million to $76 million that the General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper cost the Air Force in fiscal 2020 to fiscal 2022.
U.S. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has posited a $20 million average unit cost for CCA. In September, Kendall said that the Air Force is “very opposed to those [HASC-proposed] cost targets.”
“I don’t know where those categories came from,” he said. “That is not what we’re doing. We’ve got two increments planned. We want to keep the cost down to a fraction of the F-35. We’re having an open competition, looking at effectiveness analysis.”
The Air Force wants “continuous competition” on CCA to aid affordability and avoid vendor lock. The Air Force is to tailor CCA initially for air-to-air to support of the Lockheed Martin [LMT] F-35 and the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) manned fighter. Solicitation timelines for CCA are in the works, as is a location for the first CCA test flights.
Kendall has raised the idea of companies building 1,000 CCAs to be employed by 200 NGAD manned fighters and 300 F-35As, but within the Air Force, there has not been a consensus on CCA objective numbers and there has been some thought that the service should field many thousands of CCAs to make the task of defeating CCAs much harder.