The Air Force is buying more drones for its collaborative combat aircraft experimentation unit in Nevada to test out how the service will use these robot wingmen in a potential fight.
“One thing that I recently did was approve some additional CCA purchases to equip the experimental operations unit in order to enable that experimentation to happen using real assets,” Andrew Hunter, the service’s acquisition chief, said today at Defense One’s State of Defense Business event.
The service will buy additional prototypes from both vendors building “increment one” CCAs—General Atomics and Anduril—for the experimental operations unit, Hunter said. The service has been setting up the unit at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada to test how it might use CCAs in operations and how the drones will pair with manned fighters.
Hunter did not say how many drones the service will buy, or when these test assets will get to the Nevada unit.
The additional buy will help “ensure that warfighters will have ample opportunity for experimentation to support operational fielding before the end of the decade,” Diem Salmon, Anduril’s vice president for air dominance and strike, said in a statement.
The experimental operations unit will help the Air Force build trust with the autonomous fighters, and formulate tactics, techniques, and procedures, said General Atomics spokesman C. Mark Brinkley. “Supplying them with actual CCAs is an important step to that. We’re happy to support them in any way,” Brinkley said.
Both companies’ CCA designs recently cleared a key milestone, called critical design review, Col. Timothy Helfrich, senior materiel leader for the advanced aircraft division at Air Force Materiel Command said today at the Mitchell Institute’s Airpower Futures Forum. The service has been able to keep the program on track by stopping when it’s “good enough,” Helfrich said, instead of going after a highly exquisite system.
“If we are to continue to add capability and gold plate things, we’re going to miss out on our costs and most importantly our schedule targets. And so making some of those tough trades. To say this is good enough and moving on has been a challenge, because we want a lot, but we are making those decisions,” Helfrich said.
General Atomics and Anduril expect to fly their drone offerings sometime next year, after which service officials will decide whether to build one or both of the companies’ offerings in increment one. This decision hinges on first flight—but also each company’s production capability, Hunter said.
“It’s the approach to production, right? It’s the people demonstrating that they can scale to the rates that we envision for this platform and that are necessary for it to be affordable mass. So I think both vendors have an opportunity to succeed, and it is entirely conceivable that we could move forward with both,” Hunter said.
The Air Force has emphasized that CCAs need to be cheap enough to buy en masse, and while service officials haven’t disclosed the exact price, Hunter reiterated that a CCA will be a fraction of the cost of an F-35 fighter jet, and that he’s “feeling good” about the figure they reached.
Along with CCAs, the Air Force is devising plans for two key modernization programs: a sixth-generation fighter jet, called Next Generation Air Dominance, and a next-generation tanker. The designs of all three new programs are tied together, both from an operational and cost perspective. But, there’s not enough money to pursue all three programs as the plans stand today, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said recently.
Kendall’s comments were a signal to the acquisition community to focus on affordability from the start, Hunter said, which is why the service baked affordability into its approach to CCAs.
“We need to be doing that with all of our programs. We need to do it with the Next Generation Air Refueling System, the NGAS program. We need to do it with our solution for our air dominance going forward. Affordability has to be a key component,” Hunter said.
All of these modernization plans will likely change under a Trump presidency, but asked about how the service will fare under the new administration, Hunter didn’t say much.
“A lot depends on what is the strategy that the incoming administration adopts, and I’ll be looking to see that as well as the rest of you. I think if the strategy remains similar, I think you’re going to see that Air Force systems are well designed to address the challenges of the strategy,” he said.
