Among the new aircraft programs the Air Force included in its fiscal 2024 budget request are uncrewed, autonomous wingmen for its fighters, a next-generation tanker program, a fast-as-possible replacement for its aged E-3 AWACS air battle management jets, and a new airborne command post. It ...
President Joe Biden’s administration released its proposed 2024 budget on March 9, including $842 billion for the Department of Defense—and while the Pentagon has yet to offer many specific details on how that money would be spent, the White House said its spending plan “builds ...
Collaborative Combat Aircraft should be viewed as force-builders and not expendable vehicles, senior USAF and industry leaders said at a panel discussion during the AFA Warfare Symposium in Colorado this week. Building 1,000 such aircraft in the needed timelines will require tapping the commercial industrial ...
The Air Force should focus on fighter pilots learning to operate with one Collaborative Combat Aircraft before asking them to control two or more, ACC commander Gen. Mark D. Kelly said. The first CCAs should probably have some kind of electronic warfare mission, he added.
The Air Force will field 200 Next-Generation Air Dominance aircraft and notionally 1,000 Collaborative Combat Aircraft, and will request funds in the fiscal 2024 budget to develop these new systems, Secretary Frank Kendall said in his keynote address at the AFA Warfare Symposium on March ...
The Air Force needs a new force-sizing construct to budget and plan to, but first has to figure out a force-presentation model to combatant commanders that’s worded in language and metrics common with the rest of the Joint force, Lt. Gen. James C. Slife, deputy ...
With the Air Force poised to pour significant resources into its Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program, the service shouldn't become fixated on a particular price point for each of the unmanned aircraft to the point of neglecting capability or reliability, two of the generals helping ...
The Air Force will make a “significant investment” in uncrewed, collaborative combat aircraft in the fiscal 2024 budget, a quartet of generals announced at the Pentagon. They insisted that the technology is mature enough to move aggressively toward a program that will yield operational capability ...
Royal Australian Air Force Air Commodore John Haly moderated a discussion on "Enabling Manned/Unmanned Teaming" with John Clark of Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, Ben Strasser of General Dynamics Mission Systems, and Mike Atwood of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems at AFA's Air, Space & Cyber Conference. ...
Initial planning has begun for the retirement of the B-1 and B-2 bombers, but the game plan depends largely on progress in fielding the B-21 Raider—and on Congress—the Air Force’s bomber program executive officer said. In an Air Force bomber roadmap from 2018, the service ...
Heather Penney of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies moderated a discussion on "Manned-Unmanned Teaming: Myth and Reality" with Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote, Air Force deputy chief of staff for strategy, integration, and requirements, Mike Benitez of Shield AI, Robert Winkler of Kratos, and ...
While collaborative combat aircraft are among Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall’s “operational imperatives,” Air Combat Command was already working on the idea, the Air Force reported. Senior USAF leaders at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference said they were looking for a swift pace of ...