The US Air Force awarded contracts to five companies to design and build Collaborative Combat Aircraft that can fly autonomously alongside manned platforms, a spokesperson confirmed. The plan is to spend $5.8 billion over the next 5 years. In its fiscal 2024 budget request, the Air Force outlined plans to spend $5.8 billion on CCAs over the next five years, and $392 million in fiscal ’24 alone. That figure is a small down payment on what is shaping up to be an enormous program. While Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has set 1,000 CCAs as a working number of such aircraft. There is already talk about getting to 2000 or more drone wingman systems.
The US Air Force (USAF) is set to downselect contractors on the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program from five current potential providers to two to three within the next few months.
“The next phase is going to take us into development for production,” Kendall continued. “Then we’ll be moving forward in a couple of years to downselect for production. How many [contractors] we’ll be able to carry into production is still uncertain. We [will] definitely [have] one but there’s a possibility that we could do more than one.”
They are:
Boeing
Lockheed Martin has the distributed team air drone wingman support concept.
Northrop Grumman
In 2021, Grummand revealed the designn for the Model 437 — a stealthy jet with a 3,000 mile range — is a collaboration between the company and Scaled Composites. It is a wingman drone concept.
Anduril is a silicon valley based drone company. They have better software and a faster pace of development than the old military weapons companies. They have a design for the Fury wingman combat drone.
General Atomics
General Atomics unveiled its concept for a Gambit series of uncrewed aircraft last spring, with optional external configurations optimized for sensing, fighter escort, defense suppression and ground attack, all using a common core to increase commonality and modularity.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Seems not ambitious nor future-proof enough.
Expensive near-human-capable wingmen-drones? Good in theory.
But seems too easy to ‘flood the sky’ with $50,000ea drone armadas – 200x fleet of 1,000 – 5,000 lb pseudo-autonomous remote drones intercepting a ‘squadron’ of 10 – 1 pilot + 9 wing-men- drones @ 20,000 to 50,000 lbs at $10M to $50M (pilot) each?
The world will belong to drone armadas in NATO/China in late 2020s – piloted craft? That is so 2010.
5 to 6 billion dollars seems (IMO) a very low ball figure for such technology to be designed and intergrated into our air force. My instincts tell me this technology is going to require a lot of “hand holding” For starters, that they don’t crash into one of our own planes. Which would be so problematic, not to mention embarrassing. That amount of money seems way to low to make sure that does not happen. I’m sure we all heard the expression; Pay me now, or pay me (a lot more) later?