NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—Conducting battle management from a cockpit or a command-and-control aircraft is nothing new but the coming introduction of long-range jet-powered drones that will work with manned platforms amid a shift to all-domain sensor and communications networking will introduce a more complex battlespace that requires greater levels of integration and training, an Air Force official said on Monday.
In the “all-domain fight” that includes coalition partners, the “long-range kill chain” may include a space-based sensor giving a target update to a strike aircraft that “doesn’t have organic target coordinates” and then fires a long-range weapon that in turn receives updated target data from a “collaborative sensor forward,” Thomas Lawhead, assistant deputy chief of staff for strategy, integration, and requirements for the Air Force, said at the annual Air Force Association national symposium here.
“We’re working essentially on this whole puzzle that all needs to come together at the right time,” Lawhead said. “So, the ability to do that…at scale and in time is what is going to take practice.”
The Air Force is currently planning to spend $5 billion over five years on the CCA effort, which initially is focused on platforms that aid with air-to-air support of the F-35 fighter and future Next Generation Air Dominance manned fighter.
Lawhead said the Air Force has “thousands of people working” on solving the challenges of the future battlespace and how to integrate the various platforms and sensors.
“I think in the future our integration issues and problems are the real tough ones that we’ll have to solve,” he said
Lawhead is “completely confident” industry will overcome the technical and development challenges related to the CCAs as will the Air Force’s Experimental Operations units—slated to stand up in 2024—in figuring out how the robotic drones will be used, sustained, maintained, and integrated in a live environment with the joint force and allies.
“The thing we need to continue to evolve on is how does the whole battle picture work and how do we bring together this very diverse force that are disaggregated to a culminating point in time and space of where they need to be, when they need to be there to bring that effect to the battlespace,” he said.
This experimental work will begin “at a relatively low level of autonomy” and narrow mission set and then increase the “level of autonomy and the breadth of missions that those aircraft will perform,” Lawhead said.
The Air Force in 2022 in a strategic requirements document outlined an “umbrella of capabilities” for autonomous collaborative platforms with CCAs being one of these, he said. Eventually, the service will move from air-to-air support to CCA’s focused on strike, reconnaissance, mobility, and other missions, he said.