Analyses and wargames indicate the second increment of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program should not be an “exquisite” aircraft—meaning very stealthy and equipped with many sensors and weapons—but it should have more capability than Increment 1, and an additional cost of 20-30 percent would be acceptable, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told Air & Space Forces Magazine this week.
The CCA program is meant to produce semi-autonomous combat aircraft to fly in formations alongside with manned platforms, carrying extra weapons or, in later iterations, acting on their own or in concert with other CCAs on sensing or attack missions.
Yet the capabilities and the cost of these “wingman” drones remain a frequent topic of discussion among Air Force and industry leaders.
For the first increment, at least, Kendall has said the Air Force is shooting for a cost per airframe that is a “fraction” of the price of a crewed F-35, somewhere between $25-30 million each.
Preliminary work has begun on a second increment, but to date, Air Force officials had declined to define the characteristics it wants for this second bath, with the possibilities ranging from an even simpler and cheaper aircraft than Increment 1 to a very sophisticated platform that could penetrate deep inside contested airspace and conduct kinetic attacks.
Increment 2 should “definitely” not be “exquisite,” Kendall said.
“The idea here is affordable mass,” he explained during an extensive exit interview. Wargames and analyses have shown that CCAs in large numbers multiply combat options for the Air Force and impose a significant cost on any adversary, who must take each one seriously and dedicate missiles or countermeasures to stop them, Kendall said. Making a highly capable—and expensive—CCA would defeat that value, he said.
Yet Kendall also seemed to pour cold water on the notion that Increment 2 will be simpler and cheaper than Increment 1.
“I think, personally, something that has some increase in cost over Increment 1 would not be outrageous,” he said, citing a cost increase for the second iteration as “20 or 30 percent, something like that. But, again, it depends upon the mix, right? What capabilities do you put on every aircraft, every CCA? What do you distribute?”
The Air Force has typically equipped its fighters with “all the subsystems necessary for that fighter to essentially operate alone: its own sensors, its own [electronic warfare], its own countermeasures,” Kendall said.
But in the future, the secretary said, the service may instead choose to split up those capabilities among different CCAs as well as the manned fighter. An enemy would have to assume all the CCAs are similarly capable, “and that’s a substantial advantage for the user,” he said.
Kendall may also have been hinting at some of the options being explored for the Next-Generation Air Dominance system, which he characterized as a crewed successor to the F-22. Kendall has left decision-making on the way forward for the NGAD to his successors in the Trump administration.
CCA Increment 1—which has two variants being developed by Anduril Industries and General Atomics—is “moving forward really well,” Kendall reported.
“We’re going to get that fielded within the next few years. We’re going to get a lot of experience with that. What I have seen in simulations with our operators shows that it has enormous operational payoff, and we’ll get more experience with actually using them in operational units and operational exercises, and so on. We’re going to learn an awful lot from that,” he said.
At the same time, Kendall also wants to see updates and improvements. For the autonomy technology that underpins CCAs, the Air Force is still running programs like the X-62 Vista and the Viper Experimentation and Next-gen Operations Model–Autonomy Flying Testbed program, or VENOM-AFT.
For sensors, weapons, and airframes, work is “well underway” on Increment 2, and the Air Force is “sorting through different configurations for Increment 2, and what we want to do there, to get full advantage” Kendall said.
However, he reiterated that the Trump administration will make the final choice on what CCA Increment 2 looks like.
Ultimately, though, Kendall said he regards launching the CCA program and getting the first increment on contract is one of the signature programmatic achievements of his tenure as secretary. The CCA is “a transformative capability for the Department, for the Air Force,” he said.