WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force should consider additional uses for its planned fleet of drone wingmen beyond just flying them alongside fighter jets, a top officer said Wednesday.
Lt. Gen. Jim Slife, the service’s deputy chief of staff for operations, made his pitch Wednesday on the Defense News Conference in Arlington, Virginia, suggesting the proposed collaborative combat aircraft could fly alongside the Air Force’s next-generation aerial refueling system. The service hopes to field the planned NGAS tanker by the mid-2030s, said Slife, who the White House on Wednesday nominated to be the Air Force’s next vice chief of staff.
As well as, Slife said, the Air Force could consider what role a CCA might play with the B-21 Raider stealth bomber now being built by Northrop Grumman. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall last yr floated the thought of the B-21 Raider having its own cadre of CCAs, but later dropped that plan after the service concluded it might be prohibitively expensive.
“We shouldn’t foreclose any of those things,” Slife said. “We must always keep our options open for the way we employ them.”
The Air Force desires to field a wide range of collaborative combat aircraft later this decade in a position to perform multiple missions, including strike, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and electronic warfare. Air Force officials have also said CCAs could range in cost and complexity, with some expensive and exquisite, while others more cost effective that the service could afford to lose in combat.
Because the Air Force develops CCAs with multiple vendors, it’s considering the way to fold them into its current squadron structures. Those decisions will even shape how the Air Force uses CCAs in a future conflict, Slife said, warning against locking the technology into organizations that might ultimately hamper potential uses.
“How we organize them will ultimately affect how we take into consideration their utility and what could be done with them at the top of the day,” Slife said. “Might [CCAs] have the option to do resupply in a contested area? It probably will. But in case you make CCAs organic to our current fighter squadrons, you’re probably not going to be excited about how we use them for resupply. When you make them organic to a C-17 squadron, we’re probably not going to take into consideration how they could be used for [combat missions].”
“How we predict concerning the organization of CCAs and whether we wish to specialize them for certain kinds of missions depending on their attributes or not — I feel it’s really the place that’s ripe for experimentation,” Slife added. “Those might be among the interesting questions within the years ahead.”
The most effective ideas for using CCAs probably won’t come from generals, Slife said, but slightly captains in the sphere once they receive the drones.
“As we get an initial tranche of capabilities and we’re in a position to put within the hands of some crews which might be closely related to the tactical missions, I feel they are going to come up [with] ways to employ them that we haven’t even conceived of,” Slife said.
Slife explained the Air Force will likely use nontraditional acquisition authorities to assist it work with multiple vendors on CCAs more quickly, and iterate recent versions as this system progresses.
Gen. Mark Kelly, head of Air Combat Command, said through the panel that units in the sphere could adapt the inexpensive versions of CCAs using open-systems architecture to tailor them to missions needed on a specific day.
However the more elaborate CCAs may not have such adaptability, Kelly said.
“We very likely might be into arenas where we’ve to decide on: Today this CCA goes to be a jamming platform, and at the present time this CCA goes to be a strike platform,” Kelly said. “When you get to a unique price point and also you get to a unique scenario, very like an F-35 — we don’t tell an F-35, ‘Today you’re going to jam this particular waveform, tomorrow you’re going to sense, and the third day you’re going to shoot.’ ”
The Navy and Marine Corps fly their very own F-35 fighter jets, and the Navy can also be working by itself CCA program. Kelly said that because the Air Force develops CCAs, it’s going to need to make sure it builds them with waveforms which might be in a position to communicate with fighters and other drones flown by sister services and allies.
He said Air Force officials normally refer to counterparts in other services not less than weekly about their requirements for CCAs, comparable to range, payload and sensing capabilities, and their associated costs, in an effort to ensure interoperability.
Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.