Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.)
Capitol Hill is supportive of the Pentagon’s, and particularly the U.S. Air Force’s, plan to develop large numbers of uncrewed Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), and the upcoming defense policy bill will look to accelerate this push, a key lawmaker says.
Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee’s tactical air and land forces subcommittee, says the CCA plan is critical and needs to be sped up to increase the combat capacity of current and future fleets.
“This is a game changer in the way that I think is only limited by our imagination,” Wittman said May 17 during an Applied Intuition and Atlantic Council symposium in Washington. “I am very excited about that. We’re going to be doing a lot of things in this [National Defense Authorization Act] to really enable the CCA to move to the left, because we have to get it into the hands of the warfighter as quickly as we can.”
The push for “loyal wingman” CCAs has largely been led by Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, who devised the service’s push for the aircraft based on existing efforts such as DARPA’s Air Combat Evolution, the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Skyborg and Boeing Australia’s Ghost Bat. These programs, coupled with mature technology demonstrated across industry, have shown the CCA goal to be realistic, Air Force officials say.
In March, Kendall said he told the service’s planners to assume a fielding goal of 1,000 aircraft: two for each of 200 Next Generation Air Dominance fighters and two each for 300 F-35s.
The service’s fiscal 2024 budget request kicks off this goal with $488 million planned for spending on new programs coupled with $1.94 billion in spending on related existing programs. New spending includes $68 million to start Project Viper Experimentation and Next-Gen Operations Model, to add autonomy to six F-16s, along with $72 million for an experimental operations unit to work out the doctrine, training and needed infrastructure for CCAs. Over the next five years, the Air Force plans $6.375 billion in new spending for CCAs.
Wittman says that based on information from the services and industry, CCAs will “allow our manned aircraft to do orders of magnitude more than what they could do with a single pilot behind the sticks.”
The uncrewed aircraft can provide sensing, electronic warfare and additional weapons to allow crewed aircraft to operate at a safer distance to focus on target acquisition and battle management.
There are dozens of companies with similar platforms that have been developed and would be ready to go quickly, Wittman says.
“That’s why it’s so important for us to make sure we get this underway,” Wittman says. “We’re going to have to look at how we resource that. I can tell you, there’ll be a lot of attention this year on how we resource that.”
