NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—As the Air Force moves toward autonomous drones conducting missions with manned aircraft, variables such as cost and affordability, production capacity, capabilities, and how many vendors might initially be part of the robotic air combat platform will come down to finding the best combination of tradeoffs between these in the coming years, Air Force officials said on Wednesday.
The higher the price of a solution, the less flexibility there will be in the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program, Brig. Gen. Dale White, program executive officer for Fighters and Advanced Aircraft, told reporters. Citing Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall’s direction that “speed to ramp” of the CCA program is “critically important,” White also said that the more complex a solution is the slower the program proceeds.
“We have constructed the program in such a way that we’re able to balance price against requirements and understanding where those trades exist,” White said. “And then building that affordability piece into the foundation of how requirements get built.”
The Air Force is budgeting about $5 billion over five years for the CCA and has about $500 million planned for fiscal year 2024. The initial focus on the program is air-to-air support for the F-35 and future Next Generation Air Dominance manned aircraft and while Kendall has mentioned having 1,000 of the smart, long-range drones, he has also said the numbers will be driven by cost, complexity and how many CCAs can be controlled by crewed aircraft.
Defense analysts have said that the Air Force would play a significant role in a future Indo-Pacific conflict, as Navy aircraft carriers would be hard pressed to launch their air wings to conduct long range strikes.
A key aspect of the CCAs will be the ability to fly and operate autonomously, potentially allowing the drones to fly in GPS and communications-denied environments and even flying far forward to help keep manned aircraft out of harm’s way.
A key attribute for the autonomy software is that it will be platform agnostic.
Despite speed being of the essence in the development and acquisition of CCAs, the Air Force is taking a walk before run approach.
White said that the program will “move slowly into autonomy and integration.” Integration of CCAs with an F-35 initially will be kept “low.” The level of autonomy built in will be balanced against complexity, he said.
“And so, were going to maintain our appetite to move slowly into the autonomy piece,” White said. “And we do believe based on what we’ve seen, it’ll be very operationally viable product.”
The Air Force is taking a multi-increment approach to CCA. The first increment is aimed at meeting the “speed to ramp” objective of affordable mass in the coming years and “change the face of the fight,” White said.
Increment two is about adding additional capabilities “both from an autonomous perspective and basically bring in some of the things that we found from our operational experimental unit, as well as some of the testing environment,” White said.
As testers and operators get more time with autonomous capabilities and CCAs, the “captains…are going to find new and innovative ways to determine how this capability changes that fight,” he said.
The Air Force is gaining insights into autonomy challenges through Project Venom, an experimentation effort that involves flying autonomous software on multiple manned F-16 fighters to develop the algorithms. These aircraft can tie with the sensors found on fifth generation F-35s, Maj. Gen. Evan Dertien, commander, Air Force Test Center at Edwards AFB in California, said during the round table.
Project Venom also gives the Air Force a “foundation…to make sure we have a test range ready to develop CCAs and autonomy,” the personnel, the business practices, and safety procedures that will be used for “future systems,” Dertien said.
White highlighted that CCAs and related autonomy present the service with a new testing challenge.
“It’s a different kind of testing, different kind of requirements, different kind of expertise,” White said.
Brig. Gen. Scott Cain, commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory, pointed out that Project Venom continues the technology development work the lab has done under the Skyborg effort, which has involved the development and testing of a jet-powered aircraft made by Kratos Defense and Security Solutions
[KTOS]. The Kratos drone aircraft is called the X-58 Valkyrie and the company will be one of the competitors vying for the CCA program.
Skyborg is to become an Air Force program of record in fiscal 2024 and may get a name change from its Star Trek moniker.
The Air Force is not discussing the upcoming milestones for CCA, although officials maintain that “continuous competition” will be a theme. White said the timelines are “very rigid” and that “we know exactly what it is we want to do and when we need to do it and how that’s going to inform the way forward.”
There will be continuous competition across all facets of the material solutions, including the air vehicles, autonomy platforms, and the mission systems, White said.
Vendors, including traditional and non-traditional defense contractors, exhibited a wide variety of potential CCA candidates at different sizes and weights and at price points ranging from $200,000 or so up to millions and possibly 10s of millions of dollars.
This helps create a broad “decision space” for Brig. Gen. Chis Niemi, the director of plans, programs, and requirements at Air Combat Command, White said.
Eventually, there will be a “down select to a vendor that does the integration of the autonomy and has the vehicle and then the mission system as well,” White said. He added that “The goal is not to have multiple variants out that we have to try to maintain or sustain. There are still some traditional aspects of acquisition. The only difference here is we will keep a continuous competition approach going throughout.”
Regarding the vendor exhibits of potential CCA solutions at the AFA event, White said whoever is selected will represent the “sweet spot” based on the various tradeoffs between cost and capabilities the program must choose between.
While the initial focus is on integrating CCAs with F-35s, Niemi said a “stretch goal” for the program is to connect other aircraft, such as the future B-21 stealth bomber. In a hostile environment, the bomber escort could be compromised, so having CCAs as part of the force package could enable the B-21s to complete their mission, he said.