The Air Force now believes a single manned fighter can control a larger number of drones than previously thought, and can do so using less-sophisticated autonomous technology, according to USAF’s director of force design.
No one is saying yet how many Collaborative Combat Aircraft can be teamed with a single manned fighter, but testing and simulations demonstrate these larger combinations “present dilemmas to our adversary that we didn’t think were possible,” said Maj. Gen. Joseph D. Kunkel Jan. 28, during a virtual event hosted by Defense One.
The exact number of CCA drones USAF could team with its manned fighters remains classified, Kunkel said. Since 2022, Air Force leaders including then-Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall suggested ratios of from two to five drones per manned jet, with a notional plan of two drones per fighter seeming the most likely.
Now that picture is changing. “We thought that it was going to be small ratios,” Kunkle said. “And what we’re finding is, actually, it’s bigger than we thought.”
Lockheed Martin CEO Jim Taiclet, speaking separately on an earnings call the same day, suggested the ratio may quadruple.
“We can already control out of an F-35 up to eight autonomous drones,” he said. “We’ve shown this [to the] Secretary of the Air Force a few months ago. It’s … public knowledge.”
Taiclet mentioned the one-to-eight fighter to CCA ratio during Lockheed’s October earnings call, but Kunkel’s comments are the first from an Air Force official suggesting the two-to-one planning ratio may have changed. It’s also in line with recommendations from a late 2022 Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies paper, which suggested six or seven CCAs per fighter.
Not only can pilots control larger numbers of CCA drones, Kunkel said, but they won’t need drones with the most cutting-edge autonomy software to do it.
“What we thought was going to be this requirement for a great amount of autonomy and a significant amount of artificial intelligence, and really, really complex algorithms,” he said, has turned out to be instead “frankly, simple autonomy, simple algorithms, a little bit of AI sprinkled in. … We’ve been able to decrease pilot workload to a degree where they can really, really effectively utilize these capabilities.”
Kunkel called the development “probably the most exciting part” of the CCA program so far, because it opens up more options for how the Air Force can employ the drones.
“[Pilots] can take advantage of the mass and present dilemmas to our adversary that we didn’t think were possible in terms of the force ratios that we can present,” he said.
“Mass” has long been a crucial theme behind the CCA program. Because CCAs are less costly than manned aircraft, they offer a route to beefing up the combat air forces, which have declined in number over time. That provides an answer to China’s growing force size, while presenting the Chinese with a more complex targeting challenge against larger number of rival aircraft.
Speed is another emphasis. USAF leaders want at least 100 drones in the fleet by 2029, and Kunkel suggested the Air Force may soon start flying test aircraft from Anduril and General Atomics, whose designs passed a design review in October.
“The critical design review was a crucial step in this plan to field something very quickly,” Kunkel said. “The fact that both of them passed and they met the requirements that were levied upon them and frankly, they’re ready to fly, and in some cases, are flying, puts us in a really, really good spot. I feel like the next steps are to actually get them in the air.”
The Air Force has an experimental test unit working on developing the best ways to use CCAs, and the service is also using its X-62 VISTA program to experiment with the autonomy software undergirding CCAs.
“We’re making a lot of progress on autonomy, exactly what that autonomy needs to be, and then we’re learning new ways just to develop it,” Kunkel said.
With the Air Force focusing on relatively simple autonomy, Kunkel stressed that the service is not interested fully autonomous drones, because these would “not be compliant with the American way of war.”
Having a human in the loop is essential for combat aircraft operating at high speeds, Air Force leaders have said.
“If there’s a person in an airplane that’s next to this thing, the chances of it getting cut off are less, we think,” Kunkle said. “I think you’ll see that tie to the manned platform be something that’s pretty important for how we operate the future.”
Lockheed’s Taiclet said the F-35, equipped with the new Tech Refresh 3 upgrades, is capable of maintaining that tie. “TR-3 gives the F-35 the three things that you need for an effective node,” Taiclet said: data processing, storage, and connection to the cloud.
“Those are the three technical elements you need to have to be able to drive 5G-level connectivity among nodes in a network like this,” he said.
Editorial Director John Tirpak contributed to this report.