Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said his service is aiming for\u00a0its future Collaborative Combat Aircraft<\/a>\u00a0(CCA) drones that will fight alongside crewed aircraft to each cost as little as a quarter of the current price of an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Kendall offered this and other details about the CCA program\u00a0during a public event today<\/a>\u00a0at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) think tank in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The CCA effort is centered on the acquisition of at least a thousand advanced uncrewed aircraft with high degrees of autonomy designed to work closely together with crewed combat jets. The program is part of the Air Force’s larger Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) modernization initiative that also includes the development of a\u00a0new crewed sixth-generation combat jet<\/a>,\u00a0weapons<\/a>,\u00a0electronic warfare suites<\/a>,\u00a0sensors, battle management capabilities<\/a>,\u00a0engines<\/a>, and other systems.<\/p>\n Kendall and other senior Air Force officials regularly describe these uncrewed aircraft as a critical component of how the service will conduct operations, especially in a high-end fight against an opponent like China, and\u00a0achieve critical “affordable mass”<\/a>\u00a0in the future.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n “If we go ahead buying just\u00a0the NGAD platform and F-35s<\/a>\u00a0… and\u00a0B-21s<\/a>\u00a0as … our combat aircraft, you can’t afford the Air Force. Those systems are all [in the] 100 million dollar plus category, in some cases, way beyond that,” Kendall said today. “So, we’ve got to have something that will allow us to have massive, affordable prices. So, CCA is designed to do that.”<\/p>\n The other main takeaways regarding the CCA effort from Kendall’s chat with Stacie Pettyjohn, Senior Fellow and Director of CNAS’ Defense Program, and the subsequent question and answer session are as follows:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Kendall’s comments here about the projected costs and production goals for the CCA program, as well as how the Air Force hopes to maximize what it can get capability-wise within those constraints are notable. While the CCA drones still look set to be significantly cheaper than fifth or sixth-generation combat jets, what is being laid out here is not necessarily inexpensive even by U.S. military budget standards.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n How the unit costs of the three existing variants of the F-35 are calculated has long been a subject of debate. For instance, as of January, Lockheed Martin\u00a0pegged the price of the A variant<\/a>\u00a0the Air Force flies at $69.9 million, according to\u00a0Air & Space Forces Magazine<\/em>, but that figure doesn’t include\u00a0the Pratt & Whitney F135 engine<\/a>. The U.S. military’s F-35 Joint Program Office\u00a0told\u00a0Defense One<\/em><\/a>\u00a0recently that the average unit price for examples of all three variants, including the engines, in the latest production lots is around $82.5 million.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n A quarter of that would be just under $20.6 million. The bill for buying 1,000 CCAs with that unit cost would therefore be close to $20.6\u00a0billion<\/em>. As Kendall noted, this is still much cheaper than purchasing substantial numbers of crewed jets at close to $100 million apiece, or substantially more. The Secretary of the Air Force\u00a0has previously said<\/a>\u00a0that each NGAD jet, of which the service plans to buy 200, would cost “multiple hundreds of millions of dollars.”<\/p>\n In terms of CCA requirements, Kendall’s specific mention of wanting to get away from larger runways is interesting, but not surprising. The Air Force has made no secret of its concerns about the growing vulnerability of\u00a0large, established bases<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0the need for more distributed operations<\/a>, as well as\u00a0new camouflage, concealment, and deception<\/a>\u00a0capabilities and tactics, as being essential for reducing those risks going forward.\u00a0The War Zone<\/em>\u00a0has highlighted in the past how complete runway independence, or short takeoff and landing performance close to it, could be very valuable for the future CCAs to have in this context, and how it could also allow for additional operational flexibility.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It’s also worth pointing out that Kendall said that multiple MQ-28s are being used to support Air Force test efforts tied to the CCA program. It\u00a0emerged in 2022<\/a>\u00a0that the service had acquired at least one of these drones, which was originally developed\u00a0for the Royal Australian Air Force<\/a>\u00a0(RAAF), but further details about that effort have been limited since then. A video the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL)\u00a0released earlier this year<\/a>, seen below, heavily featured MQ-28s, including slickly edited clips depicting them flying alongside Air Force\u00a0F-22 Raptor stealth fighters<\/a>\u00a0and other crewed aircraft.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/cca-notional-sixth-generation-1024x576.webp\")
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