U.S. Air Force Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, the head of Air Combat Command (ACC) at Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Va., said this week that he believes that the service will field Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) rapidly.
“I see that we’re gonna get Collaborative Combat Aircraft on the ramp pretty quick, and I think they’re gonna be quicker than some of the manned platforms that we’ve experienced in the last few decades,” he told a July 10 Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies’ virtual forum.
“Some of the challenges that we’re gonna work our way through–things that also may be advantages–are, ‘How are we gonna use these aircraft?’ Wilsbach asked. “When we think about manned platforms, we fly those pretty regularly, even our bomber aircraft where we need the crews to get practice. If it’s an unmanned aircraft that’s relatively automated, you probably don’t need to fly that aircraft every day. What we think is we’ll have these [CCA] aircraft to fly, but they won’t fly that often. The benefit of that is you don’t need the maintenance and the long-term sustainment. You get a lot more airframes for a given amount of money.”
In contrast to older drones, like General Atomics‘ MQ-1 Predators and MQ-9 Reapers, CCAs will be “‘flyable storage,'” Wilsbach said. “They’ll basically be in a hangar and ready to fly…Some jets may only fly a few times a year. That’s gonna save us a tremendous amount of money in sustainment and manpower but still allow us to have a huge capability, if you think about having as many as 1,000 more aircraft to commit to a fight. That’s real power.”
In April, the Air Force said that it had chosen privately-held drone makers, General Atomics and Anduril, in the first round of CCA (Defense Daily, Apr. 24). The companies beat defense industry heavyweights Boeing [BA], Lockheed Martin [LMT], and Northrop Grumman [NOC].
Wilsbach’s Air Force bio lists time in the F-22, F-15, and F-16 fighters.
“I was quite skeptical [of CCA] myself before I went through the simulator because I thought it’s pretty busy in the cockpit when you’re out flying in a four-ship or eight-ship and trying to employ your weapons and trying not to get shot and survive,” he said on July 10. “How much margin of time do you have to control the CCAs? What I found in the simulator was it took me five or 10 minutes to get the hang of it, and then it became second nature. It was very intuitive. There was enough automation and artificial intelligence in the software of the CCAs that you could give them an assignment, and they could go do it. There were tactics built into the software so the CCAs could execute a tactic and achieve an objective, and you still have some control of it so if you wanted to change your mind and alter the tactic, you had that capability…It’s not unlike having an additional wingman, only they are automated so that they do what you tell them to do.”