Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, poised to leave office next month, thinks his push to advance autonomous drones that accompany manned aircraft—the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program—will be the most revolutionary of the many programs he launched and organizational changes he’s made in the job.
At the same time, Kendall said Dec. 19, the F-35 fighter will be a crucial platform for many years to come and likely won’t be supplanted by CCA drones, which he said have a long way to go before they can match the human-piloted F-35’s performance.
Looking ahead, Kendall also said at AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies that an analysis on the future of the Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter is largely finished, but he wants the incoming administration led by President-elect Donald Trump to make the final choice and “own” decisions made about air superiority.
CCA
During his tenure, Kendall has launched his signature seven “Operational Imperatives” to modernize the force and sweeping “re-optimization for Great Power Competition.”
Asked by Air & Space Forces Magazine to identify his most impactful effort, though, Kendall said the CCA program.
“The thing that I accelerated by quite a bit that I think is going to be, ultimately, the most transformative is the CCAs. They’re going to change air warfare in some very fundamental ways,” Kendall said. Once Increment 1 of the program is in production—and Kendall said he still thinks “hundreds” will be in service before the end of the decade—the program will become “evolutionary,” he said, with many iterations.
“I think making that first step and hopefully continuing it to the next iterations is the thing that I think will have, ultimately, the most lasting impact,” he added.
Other initiatives like the Operational Imperatives were things that probably “would have happened” whether he’d been in the job or not, he said.
Within the CCA program the Air Force has sought to do several things under Kendall. It has awarded contracts to Anduril Industries and General Atomics to develop aircraft, with the goal of getting to “a meaningful inventory as quickly as possible.” The service has also worked to develop and mature the underlying autonomy software that will fly the CCAs as “wingmen” for the manned fighters.
“Then there’s the part about how to structure organizations, and how to integrate [CCAs] into organizations, what kind of basing to set up, maintenance concepts, things like that,” Kendall said. Organizations exist now to “do all of that. … We’re going to learn from that.”
It was vital, however, to make quick progress on that first first increment, Kendall said, so that the force can experiment with and learn from the new drones.
“At the end of the day, our operators are going to figure out how they want to integrate CCAs into the force,” he said. “The threat is moving in this direction too, and it’s a very close race right now. So we’ve got to figure this out. We’ve got to get it right.”
Kendall said his concerns that the Air Force culture would resist CCAs have been unfounded. Pilots have told him CCAs and autonomous platforms are going to “‘keep us alive. … Without these, we can’t do the things we need to do to be successful, operationally.'”
Asked about comments from Elon Musk—the tech billionaire who will co-lead the unofficial “Department of Government Efficiency” to advise President Donald Trump—deriding the F-35 and calling for the Pentagon to buy autonomous drones instead of manned fighters, Kendall advised caution.
“I have a lot of respect for Elon Musk as an engineer,” Kendall said. “He’s not a warfighter, and he needs to learn a little bit more about the business, I think, before he makes such grand announcements as he did.”
Removing humans from combat aircraft is still a long way off, Kendall said.
“I think it’s more like decades” before autonomous aircraft fully displace pilots, he said. “We’re not there. It’s going to be a little while before we get there.”
F-35
Despite the revolutionary nature of the CCA, the F-35 “isn’t going away,” Kendall observed.
“It’s a state-of-the-art system that’s continuously being upgraded,” he said. “There’s a reason so many countries are buying the F-35. It is dominant over fourth generation fighters, period, in a very, very serious way. It’s not even close. And there is no alternative to that in the near term.”
In the meantime, “we should continue to buy and operate” the F-35,” Kendall insisted.
He did say, however, that the government needs better performance from Lockheed Martin, the F-35 prime contractor, because, “quite honestly, they’ve not been delivering what they’ve been promising, and they’re not doing that as fast as they could, by a wide margin.”
Kendall also noted that an agreement on Lots 18 and 19 of the F-35 has just been reached, and they will be more expensive for several reasons, including more complexity, capability, and inflation.
But the F-35 is “a world-class fighter,” Kendall said. The Air Force has stuck with its 20-year-old objective of acquiring 1,763 F-35s, and while “it’s impossible to predict” whether that figure will stand, “we’re going to be buying more for some period,” he added, noting that future decisions about NGAD and CCAs could change things down the road.
Kendall said that if the Air Force proceeds with the Next-Generation Air Dominance program, “it’s going to be several years before we can field them in quantity” and its cost will be “very expensive compared to the F-35.”
NGAD
The future of NGAD is very much up in the air after Kendall decided to punt decisions about it to his successor under Trump. Two weeks later, he stood by that call.
“I don’t want to make a decision that’s going to be disrupted and reversed, potentially, by the new team,” he said. “Whatever we decide to do about that mix of programs, the new team is going to want to be able to support it and take it forward for the next four years.” He felt it was “really smart, in this case, to delay a decision. The analysis is mostly done. The new team may want some additional analysis, but I want them to own this decision, and I don’t want us to start industry down a specific course and then have to abruptly reverse that few months from now.”
He put the NGAD under review this summer, delaying a development contract and putting the unnamed finalists under an extended Technical Maturation and Risk Reduction, or TMRR contract.
There was an “affordability concern” with NGAD, which Kendall has at times characterized as potentially costing hundreds of millions of dollars per aircraft.
“It’s very expensive airplane that we could only afford in small quantities, and it has a relatively narrow mission profile, designed around certain operations and threats,” Kendall said.
Those cost concerns led to a broader reckoning, though, about the fundamental requirements for NGAD and its usefulness with changing technology. That analysis was led by a blue-ribbon panel of general and experts and is “generally done,” Kendall said. It looked at how the NGAD fighter would “operate in a mix that included uncrewed platforms” and in an Agile Combat Employment environment, in which the Air Force expects to operate from a multitude of austere locations to complicate an opponent’s targeting of air bases.
“I think the right thing to do to kick the final decision on this into the next administration,” he said, but “they’re going to need to move fast. The ‘25 budget is already on the Hill. It probably won’t be passed for a few more months. And the ‘26 budget is going to need to be submitted. So those are going to be the drivers on getting final decisions on what mix of capabilities is pursued.”