The House Armed Services Committee’s (HASC) version of a fiscal 2024 defense authorization bill would put the U.S. Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program in three cost goal categories that the Air Force finds unacceptable.
“We’re very against those cost targets,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told reporters on Sept. 11 on the Air and Space Forces Association’s air, space, and cyber conference at National Harbor, Md. “I don’t know where those categories got here from. That isn’t what we’re doing. We’ve got two increments planned. We would like to maintain the associated fee all the way down to a fraction of the F-35. We’re having an open competition, taking a look at effectiveness evaluation.”
The Air Force wants “continuous competition” on CCA to assist affordability and avoid vendor lock. The Air Force is to tailor CCA initially for air-to-air to support of the Lockheed Martin [LMT] F-35 and the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) manned fighter. Solicitation timelines for CCA are within the works, as is a location for the primary CCA test flights.
Kendall has raised the thought of firms constructing 1,000 CCAs to be employed by 200 NGAD manned fighters and 300 F-35As, but inside the Air Force, there isn’t a consensus on CCA numbers.
“After I talked about it initially, I said two to 5 [CCAs per manned platform] was the range,” Kendall said on Sept. 11. “We’d wish to have at the least two. More is best. You’ll be able to get more cost effectiveness if you happen to can do more, but you’ve got to have technology that may allow the crewed aircraft to manage that number and do it effectively. That’s still an unknown. What we’re attempting to get industry to do is mature technology and be creative after which display to us what type of capability they’ll provide and why it’s cost effective.”
Replicator is a “completely separate program,” Kendall said, adding that CCA is funded across the longer term years defense program at $5 billion. “Replicator, the Deputy [Defense] Secretary [Kathleen Hicks] has indicated she has some funds on the DoD level available for that. She’s indicated that the Defense Innovation Steering Group will probably be making selections about what systems to pursue. We now have some candidates within the Air Force for that that we’ve put together and that we’ll offer. My conversations with the deputy suggest that a few of those she looks on very positively, but we haven’t resolved all that yet. I feel that there’s a desire to maneuver in a short time on that [Replicator] program. I expect that her team will probably be working with us. We’ll be members of the team, and we’ll be helping her make those decisions fairly quickly, but that’s a very separate thing from what we’re doing with CCA.”
The 1,000 CCA goal may grow. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown said in February that CCAs are likely not to be multi-mission, but to be specialized in missions, such as jamming, sensing, or air-to-air/air-to-ground attack, to reduce CCA unit costs.
The vast Indo-Pacific region represents “a very contested security environment and growing increasingly so by the year,” Air Force acquisition chief Andrew Hunter told reporters on Sept. 11. “It definitely informs our requirements [and] shapes them, in lots of cases decisively. A CCA that wasn’t optimized for the Indo-Pacific could be significantly less attractive to us. Having said that, we also need to be very disciplined in our requirements to maneuver fast. We now have to be disciplined. We are able to’t get the whole lot overnight.”
Section 218(f) of the HASC fiscal 2024 bill–a piece entitled –divides CCAs into three categories–an as much as $3 million “expendable” CCA, an as much as $10 million attritable CCA that will be an “occasional combat loss,” and “exquisite”–a multiple sortie, as much as $25 million drone “not considered a suitable combat loss” (, Aug. 9).
The HASC low-end unit cost for CCA is lower than half that of low-quantity buys of the $6.5 million Kratos [KTOS] XQ-58A Valkyrie, while HASC’s high-end $25 million CCA is significantly lower than the $32.5 million to $76 million that the General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper cost the Air Force in fiscal 2020 to fiscal 2022.
Kendall has posited a $20 million unit cost for CCA.
The Air Force and HASC haven’t divulged any technical analyses that buttress the respective Air Force and HASC cost estimates for CCA.