Dueling robot wingmen take the stage

Two years ago, autonomous drones designed to fly and fight alongside fighter jets were just a gleam in Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall’s eye. Now, full-scale mock-ups of the robot wingmen are here—and made a splashy appearance at the service’s mainstay conference. 

Last week, Anduril Industries and General Atomics carefully wheeled their drones into a Maryland convention center for the Air & Space Forces Association’s annual Air, Space & Cyber conference, where industry executives and military officials eagerly discussed how these collaborative combat aircraft might shape the future of air superiority, what missions and roles they might fill, and how they will balance survivability and affordability.

The two companies beat out three defense giants earlier this year—Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing—to win development contracts for their CCAs. Service leaders want to see flying versions next year, and plan to decide in 2026 whether to build one or both of the companies’ offerings as “increment one,” the first tranche of CCAs. 

The seven-year-old Anduril is pitching its Fury drone, which the company absorbed with its 2023 purchase of autonomous drone maker Blue Force Technologies. 

General Atomics is offering a version of its Gambit family of aircraft. In addition to the full-scale CCA mockup, the venerable dronemaker also showed off the XQ-67 aircraft, which officials described as a potential “sensor” to the CCA’s “shooter.” The XQ-67, which first flew in February, was developed through the Air Force’s secretive Off-Board Sensing Station program and helped shape the company’s armed CCA concept. 

The Fury mock-up on the show floor was slightly smaller than General Atomics’ offering, and showed external weapons storage, which could make it the less stealthy of the two. (Both may be less stealthy than the tailless UCAVs that China is developing.)

The increment-one CCAs will essentially act as missile trucks that haul air-to-air missiles for manned fighters. Increment two will kick off next year, and while requirements are still being worked out, are slated to add mission sets like electronic attack, resilient sensing, and different types of weapons, said Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel, Air Force director of force design, integration and wargaming. Future versions could also feature different styles of sustainment and takeoff and landing, Kunkel said, perhaps runaway-independent drones. 

A key consideration while industry develops their CCA offerings is how survivable the drones should be, given the Air Force’s desire to keep the new drones’ price tags under $30 million—roughly, one-third as much as an F-35. The CCAs need to be survivable enough to reach their weapons launch point, but cheap enough to be procured in mass, officials say.  

“Obviously, you don't want to have these aircraft get out there and just all get shot down, and obviously, you don't want them to be silver bullets where they cost so much that you can't afford to lose them,” said Dave Alexander, president of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems.

Alexander said his company’s offering hits a price/survivability “sweet spot,” in part because it can carry defensive systems he did not name.

But officials with Lockheed Martin, whose design wasn’t selected for the first tranche of CCAs, say the notion of a non-stealthy sweet spot was illusory. 

The company’s operational analysis indicates that unstealthy robot wingmen are very unlikely to return from combat, and at $15 or $20 million a pop, that is a “losing proposition,” said John Clark, vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works division.

With that analysis in hand, Clark said, Lockheed had submitted a stealthier design than its rivals. 

“I think, hindsight 20/20, we could certainly armchair quarterback and say, well, the Air Force isn't valuing survivability right now, so we gold-plated something that they didn't need gold-plating,” he said. 

Clark said Lockheed is changing its approach for increment two: The company will offer a more expendable design “at a much, much lower cost point,” he said.

The Air Force’s Kunkel dismissed such concerns, saying that the service has a “very solid understanding” of how survivable it needs its CCAs to be. 

What it doesn’t yet understand is how to keep them flying without an 8,000-mile supply chain.

“We've got to build in these systems, the ability to have a limited signature, to be small enough, to be mobile enough, to have a sustainment pipeline that doesn't go all the way back to Marietta, Georgia. You've got to be able to sustain these things in the combat zone, to frankly, put them in multiple places that creates multiple dilemmas for our adversary when they're on the ground,” Kunkel said. 

The Air Force is already gearing up for the first delivery of these aircraft, and are virtually testing how these drones will pair with manned fighters. 

The service is setting up an experimental operations unit to test CCA concepts at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, and is plugging the CCAs into the Joint Simulation Environment, a next-gen flight simulator that holds virtual F-35 and F-22 cockpits, Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, commander of Air Combat Command, said during the conference. The first CCAs will go to Creech Air Force Base for testing, Wilsbach said, a base known for its drone operations. 

“We're starting to learn more in the virtual environment on how we might use these and then ultimately we'll have iron on the ramp at Creech Air Force Base. We have a team of people already at Nellis starting to work,” Wilsbach said.