NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—The Air Force and Navy are “working very closely” on a future autonomous drone program that works with manned aircraft, an Air Force official said this week.
The focus areas are interservice communications links, aircraft architecture, autonomy architecture, and the ground segment for the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), Brig. Gen. Dale White, program executive officer for Fighters and Advanced Aircraft, said at the annual Air Force Association Air Space Cyber symposium here.
“And we do have those four focus areas that allow us to leverage the interoperability that we think we need out of CCA because this is just not a single service, and we know that going in,” White told reporters during a media roundtable at the conference.
The Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps chose the four focus areas that allow each to meet their “joint needs,” he said.
The services are taking an “integrated approach” to their partnership, “not necessarily from a requirements perspective, but the fundamentals of what it takes to make a CCA capability successful,” White said. This approach gives each service “a little more flexibility to go off and address specific requirements,” he said.
For example, Navy has “marinization” challenges that the Air Force does not, White said.
The services are also having these discussions with the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and “they know fully well what we’re doing from an architecture perspective,” he said.
Architectures and standards are critical to CCA and are part of the discussions, White said. And they “represent the foundation of how we develop the autonomy architecture,” he said.
The autonomy component to CCA will be “platform agnostic” and the autonomy architecture will be “government-owned” to be able to work across industry and with the Navy and other partners, including international, White said.
“What we don’t want to do is just have a unique architecture as we explore different [CCA] variants,” he said. “We want the same autonomy not only just for the Air Force, obviously sharing with our partners. And we’ve also even had some international partners where we’re sharing architecture work with them as well. I will tell you this and I think this is critically important, the autonomy architecture and how we field that autonomy is going to be very much a central piece of interoperability inside this environment in the future.”
The Air Force is further along than the Navy on its journey in developing a CCA and the related autonomy software. The service for several years has been flight-testing the XQ-58 jet-powered drone developed by Kratos Defense & Security Solutions
[KTOS] to help understand its needs for the robotic wingman unmanned aircraft system.
The Air Force plans to spend about $5 billion during the next five years further developing and acquiring the CCA and related mission system and autonomy software.