Air Force official: CCAs to team with 'all fighters,' 'joint assets' and 'international partners'

27 August 2024

The Air Force's Collaborative Combat Aircraft will not only pair with the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the Next Generation Air Dominance platform, but also the F-15EX Eagle II, F-22 Raptor and platforms from other services or allies, according to a top Air Force official.

“We’re in lockstep with the Navy to collaborate, looking at specific areas that allow us to move forward together,” Air Force Brig. Gen. Jason Voorheis, program executive officer for fighters and advanced aircraft, said during the Life Cycle Industry Days conference last month in Dayton, OH. The teaming can work “to the extent that they have adopted our same architecture from an autonomy perspective.”

Service officials have repeatedly said they want the CCA program to embrace continuous competition and adapt to evolving technologies, with plans to purchase the drone wingmen in the thousands across several increments at a range of capabilities, from strike and electronic warfare to surveillance and cargo missions.

Key to making that interoperability possible is inviting international partners and other services to take on the Air Force’s government reference architecture, said Col. Timothy Helfrich, director of the Agile Development Office and senior materiel leader of the Advanced Aircraft Division

The Air Force Research Laboratory established some of the baselines of open and common standards and interfaces for the architecture, which will allow vendors to develop capabilities that can easily plug into the autonomy architecture.

“We didn’t want to fall into bed where we were completely locked into a contractor forever for any solution,” Steven Rogers, a senior scientist on AFRL’s Autonomy Capabilities Team 3, told a small group of reporters visiting Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, OH on July 31.

“That architecture is not written in concrete, never to be changed. We’ve learned the lesson that we are learning as we go, and we’re running with scissors,” he said, referring to the benefits of having this kind of foundation for autonomy production.

Rogers touted later in the interview that the new architecture represents the service’s commitment to a rapid tech-refresh schedule “that is unknown in the [Defense Department] acquisition world.

As this architecture comes online, Air Force officials say the opportunities to partner on software are endless.

“On a joint level, the intent is to have the vision that any service’s platform would be able to take custody of any service’s CCA,” Helfrich said. “And as we start talking about international, the more international partners that are integrated in that same fashion, the much more powerful that we are.”

The first CCA increment will be enabled with critical yet relatively basic combat-relevant autonomy that industry can provide to the service in a short timeframe, Air Force officials said in April when they revealed Anduril Industries and General Atomics were selected for continued funding to build airframe prototypes of the platforms. Other businesses are also eligible to compete prototypes for this production award on their own dime.

The service has also recently selected five classified vendors to develop the mission autonomy for this inaugural tranche with production contracts for the two separate competitions expected in calendar year 2026.

The Air Force may decide to purchase more than one air vehicle option for the first CCA increment, Voorheis said, but the buys would probably not be split evenly. The same thinking would be applied to the mission autonomy award.

“We’re not going into it with any notion of an equal split or a specific 60/40 split,” Voorheis said. “It will be wholly dependent on the performance of each of those vendors, and then the capacity that the department, our joint partners or international partners need.”

As capable vendors enter the AI space, the vendor pool will grow, and as others fall short on performance, the consortium of vendors will be similarly adjusted in real-time. The idea is to give the Air Force the ability to make decisions based on the best information possible, Helfrich said.

Happening parallel to work to get CCA increment one fielded by the end of the decade is concept refinement for increment two, which is also expected to present capabilities based almost entirely on the reference software.

The second CCA increment -- design development contracts for which are planned for fiscal year 2025 -- aims to embrace more complex capabilities based on challenging the changing threat, Voorheis said. Systems included in that tranche may be co-developed or co-produced with some of the nation’s closest international partners using the federal reference architecture.

“We’ve just begun to broach relationships, bilateral and multilateral. And really, it will be this fall that we're able to smoke out what the real interest is from each of our partners and solidify who will and who won’t be participating with us,” he said.

Counter threat

Driving the Air Force’s race to get CCAs fielded as soon as possible is the Pentagon’s acknowledgement that unmanned aerial systems are becoming more and more dangerous from adversaries like China and Russia.

One-way attack cruise missiles, large Group 3 UAS and platforms that can fly below radar levels are just some of the threats the military is tracking as having a more significant impact amid the war in Ukraine than originally expected.

Now, DOD is anticipating those systems will proliferate in a potential conflict in the Indo-Pacific region, Brent Ingraham, deputy assistant secretary of defense for platform and weapon portfolio management, said during the National Defense Industrial Association’s emerging technology conference last week.

“None of us were as good as we thought we were,” he said. “I think that a lot of people took some lessons away, without realizing that they had to figure out how to improve, how to make it mission-effective in this sort of environment.”

Adjacent to the Air Force’s speed-to-ramp CCA efforts to counter China, the Pentagon is also moving quickly on its own low-cost autonomous drone program dubbed Replicator.

Replicator, a mostly classified program, involves fielding thousands of all-domain unmanned systems by next summer. Like CCAs, the Pentagon is seeking successive iterations of those drones at varying and modular capability requirements, mostly focusing on surveillance. Each service may also present system offerings to DOD for inclusion in an upcoming Replicator tranche.

The Air Force has so been tight-lipped about which attritable systems it is considering for Replicator, but AFRL is hoping to propose an early-stage, high-altitude balloon program as an option for the effort’s next round of development funding, according to Col. Tyler Harris, a service senior materiel leader for ISR sensors.

“The program we have right now is called HALE, high-altitude long-endurance, that is a high-altitude balloon program that would field constellations of lower-cost systems that have applicability to swap out different payloads based on the mission set,” he told reporters during the LCID conference.

HALE is still in a conceptual and operational demonstration phase, Harris said, noting the high-altitude balloons have not “yet” been picked up for Replicator, but it has performed in exercises related to the program

“The Air Force has not proposed any high-altitude balloon programs for the Replicator program,” service spokeswoman Ann Stefanek told Inside Defense when asked about the offering. The Air Force did not immediately respond to an inquiry to confirm whether it has proposed a different program to the Pentagon for Replicator at this point or if HALE will eventually be an option.

AFRL is currently working with the aerospace companies Aerostar and Worldview to build the high-altitude balloons, Harris said.

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