WASHINGTON — If the Air Force has to fight a serious adversary akin to China in years to come back, a top general said, it must bring “mass” in its airpower — without breaking the bank.
But piloted fighters alone won’t be enough to keep up the USA’ prized air superiority, Lt. Gen. Richard Moore, deputy chief of staff for plans and programs, said in an interview with Defense News. Key aircraft in its fleet akin to the F-15C are rapidly aging, and the service is heading in the right direction to retire greater than twice as many fighters because it buys over the subsequent five years.
That’s why Moore said it’s vital for the Air Force to construct and field a planned fleet of a minimum of 1,000 drone wingmen to enhance its piloted fighter fleet. And the service is working to drag together industry ideas for so-called collaborative combat aircraft and its own experiments to determine learn how to make this a reality.
“The image here is changing, and what’s changing the image is CCAs,” Moore said.
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has made it clear creating CCAs is considered one of his top priorities, and the service is beginning to sort out the main points of how it would fold drone wingmen into its fleet and use them in a future conflict. In March, Kendall said he ordered the service’s planners to assume the Air Force can have 1,000 CCAs, though the ultimate number could differ from that estimate.
Key lawmakers this spring aired their concerns to top Air Force leaders concerning the state of the Air Force’s fighter fleet and its plans for fighters in years to come back.
In a March 29 hearing of the House Armed Services subcommittee on tactical air and land forces, Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Virginia, pointed to Air Force plans to divest 801 fighters by 2028 while bringing on lower than half that with 345 F-35s and F-15EXs.
Moore said in that hearing most aircraft slated for retirement are F-15Cs and A-10 Warthogs, together with some older and fewer capable F-22s and F-16s.
The Air Force’s F-15C and D Eagles are rapidly aging, as their withdrawal from Kadena Air Base, Japan, in recent months has shown, and their numbers are dwindling. The service’s planned Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter platforms won’t arrive until the tip of the last decade, at best, and will probably be very pricey, with each system expected to cost lots of of thousands and thousands of dollars. And while the Air Force continues to bring on more F-35As, the service has cut its original plans to buy 144 F-15EXs all the way down to 104.
Wittman, the subcommittee’s chairman, warned continuing on such a “glide slope,” while key adversaries akin to China proceed to take a position in fighter airpower, could turn America right into a mere “regional power.”
Moore said that CCAs will probably be vital to delivering the form of airpower that will probably be obligatory to face off against a nation with a military comparable to the USA.
But trying to achieve that level of airpower with crewed fighters alone can be prohibitively expensive, Moore said, prompting the Air Force’s turn to drone wingmen.
“We’ve to provide you with a technique to create reasonably priced mass, and that’s where CCAs got here in, and that’s why the numbers are so high,” Moore said, referring to plans envisioning a 1,000-drone fleet. “You may’t just speak about F-35s, and F-15Es, and F-15EXs and F-16s, and call that the enterprise. You have got so as to add CCAs in.”
And the service’s proposed budget for 2024 requests money to make that planning a reality. The service asked for nearly $50 million to begin a program called Project Venom that goals to refine autonomous software of the sort that might fly CCAs, and $69 million to launch an Experimental Operations Unit where officials would start developing the tactics and procedures to include CCAs right into a squadron.
Industry ideas for CCAs
Moore said that the experimental unit will reap the benefits of the Air Force’s novel acquisition approach for CCAs.
Often, he explained, the Air Force first spells out a program’s requirements to industry, which can then provide you with something that meets those requirements.
But this time, Moore said, Kendall deliberately told the Air Force not to begin by spelling out requirements, and as an alternative to ask industry what was possible. And the Experimental Operations Unit will take firms’ ideas and explore them further, Moore said, determining learn how to incorporate them into day-to-day squadron operations.
Moore said the Air Force expects to have concrete ideas from vendors on the attributes of CCAs inside a number of years, perhaps sooner “if we get lucky.”
The service will then start experimenting with drone prototypes and determine what level of autonomy is feasible.
“That will probably be fundamentally a component of the employment concept as well,” Moore said. “In the event that they’re truly autonomous, if we are able to get there, then that opens up some additional possibilities. In the event that they are somewhat autonomous, then that may lead you more to a ‘loyal wingman’ concept, or CCAs being a part of a formation with manned fighters. We’ll just must see how that plays out.”
Project Venom, during which autonomous software will probably be installed in six F-16s for experimentation, will help shape the course of those future experiments on industry aircraft, he said.
And there are numerous questions that also should be sorted out once the Air Force has industry’s ideas in hand, Moore said. For instance, will CCAs be an integral a part of a squadron and deploy together, or will they be a separate unit that deploys on their very own? Will they launch from the identical bases as crewed fighters or from different locations?
“These are questions that don’t yet have answers, because we don’t yet know the attributes of the CCA that can come,” Moore said. “We’ll work all that out as those attributes begin to crystallize. And I feel the answers will grow to be relatively obvious based on the airplanes, but we don’t have them yet.”
Some drones could have multiple applications starting from strike, intelligence collection or jamming, for instance. “The one which we’re specializing in first is the flexibility for CCAs to enhance the manned fighter force as shooters, in order that’ll be first,” Moore said.
As for industry interest, among the combat aviation segment’s largest firms have already expressed interest, including Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Kratos and General Atomics, in keeping with Moore.
“I feel we see multiple pathways to what we’re attempting to get to,” he said. “I don’t think there’s just one pathway, and we’re not depending on a single company.”
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.