'Digital Century Series' Approach May Live On In USAF's Autonomous Plans

DAYTON, Ohio—The U.S. Air Force’s short-lived “Digital Century Series” plan appears to be dead for future crewed fighters, but the service says the plan’s focus on rapidly iterating designs could be relevant for its future drones.

In 2019, Will Roper, then the assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, announced his Digital Century Series idea as a new approach to buying future fighters. It is a nod back to the Vietnam-era Century Series fighters, aircraft designated F-100 through F-106, that were quickly designed and deployed with the goal of providing new capability quickly. Roper’s plan was to use new methods such as digital engineering to similarly design and build new aircraft quickly so the Air Force would not have to wait for a long, traditional acquisition. 

However, this plan seems to have ended after Roper’s tenure and the adoption of a new approach to acquisition. Andrew Hunter, the current assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, says the service is resource constrained and needs to focus on getting effective combat aircraft more so than changing designs. 

“We can’t afford to do four different kinds, none of which actually develops into an operational capability,” Hunter told reporters Aug. 11 at the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center’s Industry Days event here. “We’ve got to develop an operational capability in a relatively quick period of time, so that does constrain how much iterative stuff we can do, at least do simultaneously.”

The Air Force is planning a “Collaborative Combat Aircraft,” (CCA) a loyal wingman that will fly with the Next Generation Air Dominance platform and provide weapons, sensors, electronic warfare or other capabilities. This could be a use case for the Digital Century Series approach. 

“The idea of a Collaborative Combat Aircraft is something that can give you mass more affordably than crewed systems,” Hunter says. “So I think we are seeing that mindset … I think there’s elements of that vision that we absolutely need to leverage. But we have a clear problem to solve, and that’s ... delivering an operational capability in the near-term time frame that gives us some affordable mass.”

The Air Force is expected to announce its plan for the CCA in the fiscal 2024 budget, following requests for information from industry released earlier this year. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has said the CCA is realistic in the near term, building on technology demonstrated in programs such as the Air Force’s Skyborg and DARPA’s Air Combat Evolution.