The fiscal 2024 congressional funding impasse has delayed development of a concept of operations (CONOPS) for the U.S. Air Force Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) drones, Air Force officials said.
The Air Force has contracted with teams–led by Anduril, Boeing [BA], General Atomics, Lockheed Martin [LMT], and Northrop Grumman [NOC]–for concept definition and preliminary design of CCA Increment 1 (Defense Daily, Jan. 24).
“On Collaborative Combat Aircraft, we have the advantage that that program is already underway and so we’ve been able to execute a good portion of it, but we have not been able to execute the Experimental Operations Unit, which will be helping us figure out the concept of operations for CCA, so we’ve lost time on a critical element of the program,” Air Force acquisition chief Andrew Hunter told the House Armed Services Committee’s (HASC) Seapower and Projection Forces panel on March 12 in response to a question from Rep. Jennifer McClellan (D-Va.) on the impacts of the fiscal 2024 Continuing Resolution (CR), now in its fifth month.
Air Force Lt. Gen. Richard Moore, the service’s deputy chief of staff for plans and programs, testified that “we have absolutely lost time, and we’ve lost buying power, and we’re not going to get either one of those back.”
“It is imperative that we have a budget and that we have it on time,” he said. “By far, the salient feature of our ability to progress is the ability to have predictable funding that arrives on time. The Experimental Operations Unit is a great example of one of the things that hasn’t been able to start. It sits in a basket of capabilities represented by the [Air Force] Secretary [Frank Kendall]’s Operational Imperatives. The secretary has been working on the Operational Imperatives since he arrived, and yet nothing has been appropriated for them. We are still waiting for the first of those dollars to arrive, and we’re giving time to our adversaries, quite frankly. They don’t have this problem.”
CRs prohibit new program starts, such as the Experimental Operations Unit. The Air Force requested nearly $69 million in fiscal 2024 for the unit and is asking for $44 million in fiscal 2025 to establish the unit as a fully manned squadron and to continue funding unit autonomous prototypes, modeling and simulation, and CCA CONOPS studies.
Hunter and Moore also discussed other Air Force modernization efforts during the hearing.
In response to a question from Rep. Donald Norcross (D-N.J.) on the status of the Remote Vision System 2.0 for the Boeing KC-46A Pegasus tanker, Hunter replied that “we are well along.”
“We’re still working with the FAA to nail down airworthiness certification, which will close approval of the design, but we have made a ton of progress toward that, and we are close,” he said.
The Air Force had expected FAA certification of the KC-46A’s RVS 2.0 cameras by the end of last year and last fall said it would complete RVS 2.0 development by the end of next year (Defense Daily, Oct. 16, 2023).
The tanker’s original RVS had five Long Wave Infrared (LWIR) “Atom” cameras made by France-based Sofradir–now part of Lynred. RVS 2.0 is to replace the two Sofradir LWIR boom sensor cameras for new boom sensor LWIR cameras by Oregon-based Sierra Olympic Technologies, Inc.
Asked by Norcross whether RVS 2.0 would field, as planned, by the end of 2025, Hunter replied, “There is some schedule pressure there and, depending on completion of the FAA certification process, I cannot guarantee you we’d be in a position to field in ’25. It may be ’26, and that is actually likely. I think it will likely field in ’26.”
The Air Force has fielded 81 KC-46As, Hunter said, out of 179 planned.
On the Northrop Grumman LGM-35A Sentinel next generation ICBM, Rep. John Garamendi, ranking member of the HASC Readiness panel and co-chair of the bicameral Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control Working Group, asked Moore and Hunter what other programs the Air Force would reduce to help cover a 37 percent Nunn-McCurdy breach on Sentinel.
“We don’t know the magnitude of the trade yet” over the next three decades, Moore replied. Hunter said that “the first determination [of DoD’s Nunn-McCurdy process] is, ‘Does Sentinel continue or not?’ That question is something that [Pentagon acquisition chief] Dr. [William] Laplante will decide.”
“That’s not the first question,” Garamendi rejoined. “That’s the end question. The first question is, ‘What’s it going to cost?'” While Hunter said that the Air Force is aiding the DoD-led Nunn-McCurdy review to determine what’s next for Sentinel, Garamendi said that the “process starts with the Air Force and the justification of the cost issues.”
“That’s where it starts, and then from there it moves on to what are the alternatives to spending the money on this–hypersonic or something else,” Garamendi said.
“How are you going to go about giving us an honest, complete answer to the Nunn-McCurdy [breach], or are you gonna do it [Sentinel] regardless because it’s been set…that we’ve had to have a triad, period?” he asked Hunter and Moore. “It is, in fact, a religious issue, having very little to do with the world in which we’re now living.” Garamendi has been among the most prominent congressional critics of Sentinel.
In January, the Air Force informed Congress of the Nunn-McCurdy program breach on Sentinel–an increase in unit cost per missile from $118 million in 2020 to $162 million due not to missile development, but to unpredicted military construction costs in what will be a massive civil works project (Defense Daily, Jan. 24). One Air Force officer said that such unforeseen costs include new Sentinel silos and cables, and rising concrete costs. The total program cost estimate is now more than $125 billion compared to more than $95 billion earlier.