While Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has posited a $20 million unit cost for the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) and up to five CCAs for each manned F-35 or Next Generation Air Dominance Fighter (NGAD), the GOP-led House Armed Services Committee (HASC) believes that the service must reach significantly lower CCA unit costs to attain the aircraft mass needed to deter China, Russia, or other emerging high-tech adversaries.
The Air Force’s fiscal 2024 budget request proposes the divestment of 131 fighter aircraft, including 42 A-10s, 57 F-15 C/Ds, and 32 Block 20 F-22 aircraft while the request proposes a buy of 48 Lockheed Martin [LMT] F-35As and 24 Boeing [BA] F-15EXs. Service officials said that the future years defense plan includes a decrease of 425 Air Force fighters, as the service moves to NGAD and the uncrewed CCA.
Section 218(f) of HASC’s fiscal 2024 bill–a section entitled NGAD Family of Systems Development Program Accountability Matrices–divides CCAs into three categories–an up to $3 million “expendable” CCA, an up to $10 million attritable CCA that can be an “occasional combat loss,” and “exquisite”–a multiple sortie, up to $25 million drone “not considered an acceptable combat loss.”
The House authorizers also want a report from Kendall on plans for “high-volume manufacturing of large attritable engine technologies for CCA.”
The HASC low-end unit cost for CCA is less 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.
The Air Force and HASC have not divulged any technical analyses that buttress the respective Air Force and HASC cost estimates for CCA.
Kendall has raised the idea of companies building 1,000 CCAs to be employed by 200 NGAD manned fighters and 300 F-35As, but within the Air Force, there is not a consensus on CCA numbers.
The 1,000 CCA target is likely to 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.
Asked last week whether five was the Air Force’s working number for the high end of CCAs to be used by a manned fighter, Air Force Brig. Gen. Dale White, the program executive officer for fighters and advanced aircraft, told reporters that the Air Force intends to “break the mold” with CCA, as DoD has traditionally wanted “to grasp onto a firm requirement and then close the door” (Defense Daily, Aug. 2).
“We are continuing to look at what the art of the possible is, and the way you do that is you put operators in a virtual seat, and let them fly with me in a virtual environment,” White said during a question and answer session at the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center’s annual industry days conference in Dayton, Ohio.
“What does massive saturation look like, depending on the mission set? We will continue to let that operational analysis, which we’ve spent so much time doing with industry, help us define the way forward,” White said. “We’re going to use that data to help define what the art of the possible is. Of course, future testing will be less virtual, and we’ll see how this plays out. But that will be defined. I think even Secretary Kendall admitted that that’s [the five CCA’s] just kind of a planning mark, and that’s kind of the path we’re on. But we’ll let the operational analysis kind of lead the way for us.”