The United States military is plunging into the robotic future of aerial warfare with both feet as awards are issued to General Atomics and Anduril for not just the development, but the mass production of hundreds of autonomous combat aircraft.
In a dramatic illustration of how fast things are changing in military circles, the Pentagon has made a major paradigm shift that will see the US Air Force using autonomous fighter planes to plug a very large gap caused by the changing geopolitical situation.
Without going into too much detail, current military planning sees the conventional reliance on manned combat aircraft as a major problem. Fighter aircraft with pilots sitting at the controls are far superior to autonomous combat aircraft and will be for the foreseeable future. The problem is that getting enough of these aircraft and the pilots to operate them is an extremely slow and expensive process.
Just look at the massive fleet of trainer aircraft the US Air Force must maintain just to keep the pilot pipeline flowing. The reason for so many is because fighter pilot is a profession for which many are called but few are chosen. Add into this the staggering complexity of aircraft like the F-35 Lightning II and the reasons why so few are fielded, relatively speaking, compared to the days of Spitfires and Mustangs is easy to understand.
However, current threat assessments show that these aircraft and pilots, however great their capabilities, simply cannot be produced in sufficient numbers to deal with the needs of all-out war.
It is with this in mind that the new contracts have been awarded. Under these, General Atomics and Anduril are tasked by the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program to develop their prototype YFQ-42A and YFQ-44A aircraft into serial production as the FQ-42A and FQ-44.
The goal of the contracts is to shift these robotic fighters into fast-paced mass production, with 150 aircraft to be built by 2030 and a long-term goal of about 1,000 units. This will allow these Loyal Wingmen to increase air combat mass by supplementing complex, low-density crewed fighter fleets with high-density, lower-cost autonomous platforms.
In addition, the new contract will separate procurement of these aircraft from the development of their software, which will be spread across half a dozen companies to prevent dependency on a single vendor. There is also what has become a standard demand to compress the development timeline from years down to months.
It's a story that keeps being repeated not only in the US, but in Europe and across the world as the major powers place an increasing emphasis on rearmament combined with fast-tracking technological development, especially in drones and other autonomous systems.
Sources:General Atomics, Anduril
