Skyborg drone, AFRL concept

Skyborg Low-Cost Combat Air Vehicle variant, AFRL artist’s image

UPDATED: Northrop Grumman response; AFLCMC additions

WASHINGTON: The world’s largest defense company, Lockheed Martin is among the nine new competitors announced yesterday for the Air Force’s vaunted Skyborg program.

Lockheed’s absence among the first round of winners in July raised eyebrows among industry analysts. Its addition means that all three big defense primes (Boeing and Northrop Grumman were tapped in the first phase) with deep ties to the Air Force now are in the running.

The Air Force’s announcement yesterday also revealed that the program will “begin the process of developing air vehicle prototype designs later this calendar year.” Up to now, the effort has largely been focused on the underlying autonomous systems to operate the drones.

UPDATE BEGINS. “An announcement regarding the first delivery order award for the procurement of missionized prototypes can be expected in October,” a spokesperson for Air Force Life Cycle Management Center told Breaking D in an email. UPDATE ENDS.

Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works has been working on next-generation unmanned aerial systems, including the human-machine teaming missions envisioned for Skyborg. Of course, the Skunk Works built the Air Force’s stealthy, and highly classified, RQ-170 Sentinel intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) drone more than a decade ago. And who knows who built the secret prototype of the Next Generation Air Dominance effort, which Will Roper announced earlier this month.

Lockheed is being a bit coy about its exact offering for Skyborg, however.

“Our proposal for the Skyborg effort leverages the leading-edge approaches Skunk Works is known for, combined with our decades of expertise designing, developing and fielding ISR & UAS solutions,” Ananda Costa, Skunk Works spokesperson, told Breaking D in an email today. It was focused, she added, “on the concurrent Phase 2 Skyborg program, which we believe offers our team an opportunity to innovate and optimize a solution that meets USAF critical mission needs in challenging environments.”

Boeing told colleague Jon Harper earlier this week that it is offering a variant of its Airpower Teaming System, which was developed in Australia for the Loyal Wingman Advanced Development Program. (The company also builds the mysterious X-37B spaceplane now operated by the Space Force.)

UPDATE BEGINS. Northrop Grumman, which recently teamed up with a group of start-ups to enhance its autonomous systems development, also wouldn’t reveal specifics about its proposal plans. (The company, after all, builds the super-secret, bat-wing-shaped, long-endurance RQ-180 surveillance drone.)

“At this stage we cannot talk specifics about our prototypes,” Scott Winship, sector vice president, Advanced Programs, said in an email statement. “However, a key strength to our offering is adaptation of our service-based, autonomous mission management system, Distributed Autonomy/Responsive Control (DA/RC), to the government’s open architecture System Design Agent (SDA), providing rapid technology insertion. DA/RC will be critical to multi-aircraft flight, payload, and sensor management, developed and integrated under this program.” UPDATE ENDS.

As Breaking D readers know, Skyborg is one of the Air Force’s high-priority “Vanguard” programs  aimed at developing low-cost, attritable drones smart enough to team with piloted aircraft to undertake a variety of missions. Those include “next-generation” intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance and strike; close air support; munitions delivery; offensive and defensive counter-air; and interdiction, according to AFRL’s website. Further, Air Force acquisition czar Will Roper also envisions Skyborg as a future node in the service’s top-priority Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) for assisting commanders run the all-domain operations.

The threat driving this is vastly improved Russian and Chinese anti-access/area denial capabilities that put the service’s pilots, and expensive modern fighter jets, at higher risk. Indeed, Skyborg is the Air Force’s top priority in its 2021 unfunded priorities list, with the service asking for $25 million to speed prototyping to rapidly field a capability to Indo-Pacific Command.

AFLCMC on July 23 announced that along with Boeing and Northrop Grumman, General Atomics and Kratos had been awarded indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (ID/IQ) Skyborg contracts, with a combined ceiling of $400 million. Leidos on May 19 won a $28 million contract to serve as “systems design agent” for the program.

Up to now, Kratos’s XQ-58A Valkyrie is the only drone body that has carried the Skyborg package. Valkyrie successfully completed the fourth of five planned tests under another AFRL effort, the Low Cost Attritable Strike Demonstrator (LCASD) program, on Jan. 23. Confusingly, this is a separate effort from Skyborg.

The award announced yesterday adds Skunk Work’s parent, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, based in Fort Worth, as well as AeroVironment Inc., Simi Valley, California; Autodyne LLC, Boston; BAE System Controls Inc., Arlington; Blue Force Technologies Inc., Morrisville, North Carolina; Fregata System Inc., St. Louis; NextGen Aeronautics Inc., Torrance, Calif.; Sierra Technical Services, Tehachapi, Calif.; and Wichita State University, Wichita.

This makes 13 vendors that will now compete for the $400 million contract ceiling, according to the press release issued by AFLCMC, which is managing the contract in partnership with AFRL. The release stresses that the intent “has always been” to make as many ID/IQ awards “as practicable, and to include additional contractors over time.”

“This second phase of awards establishes a diverse and competitive vendor pool by adding several non-traditional and traditional contractors we saw as important additions to the effort. The diversity of approaches and backgrounds, allows us to access the best industry has to offer,” said Brig. Gen. Dale White, AFLCMC Program Executive Officer for Fighters and Advanced Aircraft.

UPDATE BEGINS. The first and second phase of awards creates a pool of 13 air vehicle providers that will compete for task orders within the $400 million ceiling. These efforts will provide technology to support a family of systems with capabilities that can range from simple algorithms to autonomous flight controls, and include functions that can accomplish defined tasks or subtasks in a mission,” the AFLCMC spokesperson said.

“This phase of awards, similar to the first, will begin with a $4,000 Kickoff meeting, and will be proceeded by future digital design efforts focused around integration of the Autonomous Core System designed by the System Design Agent Leidos, and operator inputs,” the spokesperson elaborated. “The program will utilize the operational experimentation campaign to demonstrate and understand the competitive advantage that autonomous attritable technology can offer to the warfighter, and also use any lessons learned from experimentation to help influence the future design of the system.” UPDATE ENDS.

The autonomous ‘brains’ at first will be be based on “play books” developed by the Air Force that strictly define mission parameters. But, AFRL hopes, they eventually will evolve into more sophisticated, AI-driven systems that can make higher-order decisions. Roper has repeatedly said that his hope is that Skyborg can develop an AI co-pilot, a capability he nicknamed R2-D2 after the perky android co-pilot in Star Wars.

There are four lines of effort under the Skyborg program, according to AFRL’s super cool YouTube video:  software, hardware, operations and vehicle design. Key to all of those, according to AFRL officials, will be “open mission systems” that allow the program to add in innovative technology from any chosen vendor as time goes by.

“Future Skyborg efforts will demonstrate the competitive advantage of autonomous attritable technology through operational experimentation focused on warfighter inputs,” the AFLCMC release added. Those experiments are expected to start next year, to be completed by July 2026.