NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—Simulations being done with the Air Force’s future unmanned Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) are showing that operators are takings risks that they would not with manned aircraft, the director of the service’s wargaming efforts said on Wednesday.
The combination of a lower price point expected from acquiring and operating a CCA and the fact that a person’s life is not at risk drives the willingness to take more risks, Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel, director, Force Design, Integration and Wargaming, and deputy chief of staff for Air Force Futures, said here during the Air Force Association Air, Space & Cyber Conference.
“We take more risk for the tactics and things that we wouldn’t do with an airplane that’s got a person in it, we’ll absolutely do with the CCA, and we’ll say, ‘Hey, good luck little buddy. Go on. Go tackle this tough problem,’ where perhaps we wouldn’t do that with the fanned aircraft,” Kunkel said during a panel discussion about the CCA.
Survivability of these unmanned platforms so that they are likely to succeed in their missions, factors heavily into the “operational approach” for taking risks, he said.
The CCAs are one example of current and future platforms where the Defense Department is planning to acquire a lot of assets at relatively low-cost, what it calls affordable mass. The large quantities of these systems create “dilemmas” for adversaries, not only from the increased risk taking in the air but also because they can operate from more ground locations, Kunkel said.
The disaggregated deployment of Air Force combat and related assets is critical to Agile Combat Employment (ACE), the service’s “operational scheme of maneuver” to enable more flexible operations and make it more difficult for an enemy to target its forces.
Kunkel said that mass alone presents a “hard problem” for an adversary to solve, which could act as a deterrent.
For CCAs to fit with the ACE concept, Kunkel said the aircraft and their support will need key features that give it “ACEability.” One is a “low signature,” which means a short sustainment and logistics tail.
“You’ve got to be able to sustain these things in a combat zone, to, frankly, put them in multiple places that does create multiple dilemmas for our adversary when they’re on the ground,” he said, adding that “considerable work” is being done here.
This year, AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies led a tabletop exercise that showed CCAs based in the Pacific at scale could be sustained in a contested environment, Mark Gunzinger, who is the director of the institute’s Future Concepts & Capability Assessments, said during the panel discussion.
The conclusion of operators and industry was that sustainment “is not an insurmountable problem” if a smaller “logistics footprint” is built into the aircraft, said Gunzinger, who moderated the panel.
Dave Alexander, president of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems
, one of two companies competing to supply CCAs in the first increment of the program, said beyond the fuel and oil needed to fly, they need to be designed with simplicity so “you don’t touch it out in the field,” which means few spares and little test equipment.
Jason Levin, senior vice president for Air Dominance and Strike at Anduril Industries, the other company in the hunt for CCA Increment One, said building in autonomy for pre-flight, flight, post-flight, and maintenance will minimize manpower and infrastructure needs.
A “software first approach” allows the automation of things like fuel and oil level checks to eliminate the need for maintainers to “interact with the jet to get it back in the air,” he said.