The U.S. Air Force may narrow the field of five contractor teams for the first Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) technology effort to two to three in the next several months.
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).
“We’re moving with a sense of urgency on CCA,” Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall told reporters at the Air and Space Forces Association annual symposium in Aurora, Colo., on Feb. 13. “We’re doing it with both increments–Increment 1 and 2–that we’ve formulated and funded in the five-year plan. As a preamble, everything depends upon FY ’24 being appropriated.”
“Within the next few months, we’re gonna go from the five we have on contract to a smaller number,” he said. “We’re gonna have at least two. We’d like to have three. Three is gonna be difficult because of the level of funding we have in the budget. With some cost sharing from industry I think we could do three, and that would be our preference. We’re gonna be working out some way to do that, hopefully. The next phase is gonna take us into development for production. Then we’ll be moving forward in a couple of years to downselect for production. How many we’ll be able to carry into production is still uncertain–definitely one, but there’s a possibility that we could do more than one.”
In fiscal 2025, the Air Force is to award contracts for concept definition and preliminary design of CCA Increment 2, which may involve “international partners,” Kendall said.
Kendall has posited a buy of 1,000 CCAs to deploy from and aid Lockheed Martin F-35As and Next Generation Air Dominance manned fighters, but some top service officials are suggesting the need for a significantly higher target number of CCAs. The service wants autonomous CCAs for air-to-air missions initially and then for other possible areas, such as intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and jamming.
Air Force Lt. Gen. Richard Moore, Jr., Air Force deputy chief of staff for plans and programs, has said that Kendall “asked us, ‘Please don’t go to industry and give them a [CCA] requirement.’”
“The last thing in the world we want to do is tell them what to build,” Moore said last month. “We want to go to them with questions, and we want to find out what they can do. What is the art of the possible, and what is it that they could provide? Let’s allow the envelope to expand by not constraining them with a requirement, and I think what we’re starting to see now is that there are a lot of thoughts out there, some of them not necessarily from the defense primes that will really be beyond what we would have conceived had we decided to write a requirement…I think the way that this is innovative is something that will transition to other programs. I don’t think that this is one and done because I think that we’re gonna find it to be wildly successful.”