A rendering of the still-to-be unveiled B-21 Raider. (US Air Force)

WASHINGTON: The Air Force wants to give the secretive Northrop Grumman B-21 Raider stealth bomber a drone sidekick, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall announced today.

“The B-21 is a very expensive aircraft. It has a certain payload and range. We’d like to amplify that capability it has to penetrate, which is valuable,” Kendall said during a Defense One event.

“What we want is something that can go operate with it,” he said. “I won’t say accompany it — the tactics are very much to be determined. But we’re going to sort that out and think about unmanned combat aircraft and how to network them together under the control of an operator of the B-21, to operate as a formation in some loose sense.”

Kendall said little else about the capability of the B-21 drone wingman, though his comments about it not necessarily “accompanying” the B-21 hints that it may not have the same level of stealth or the ability to penetrate as deeply into enemy territory. He did not mention how many drones the Air Force could buy, nor how much money it intends to spend.

Kendall’s comments come days after he told Politico that the service would seek funds for new two classified combat drones in its fiscal 2023 budget request, due to be released in February.

“They’re both unmanned air combat vehicles, unmanned platforms that are designed to work in conjunction with fighter aircraft like [the Next Generation Air Dominance fighter] or F-22 or the F-35. On the other hand they work in conjunction with bombers like the B-21,” he told Politico.

A spokesman for Kendall could not immediately confirm whether the B-21 drone wingman would be one of the two programs unveiled next year.

The Air Force has floated the idea of a “Loyal Wingman”-style drone that would accompany fighter jets into combat and operate with some level of artificial intelligence. The service is developing an autonomy module under the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Skyborg program, and has already integrated and flown that system with the uncrewed Kratos UTAP-22 Mako and General Atomics’ MQ-20 Avenger. A similar flight test with Boeing’s Loyal Wingman drone is planned for 2022.

However, the service had not previously disclosed plans to develop a similar uncrewed aircraft that would operate alongside the B-21 bomber.

Skyborg and other ongoing development work on Loyal Wingman drones will function as “feeders of technology” for the B-21 drone sidekick, Kendall said today, before clarifying that the new program isn’t just a science experiment, but a serious procurement effort for a novel weapon system.

“We’ll take a period of time to sort all that out, and then we’re gonna get out on building something we’re gonna field,” he said. “It’s a commitment to going forward in a direction that we have been thinking about experimenting with, but hadn’t committed to before. So that’s a major change, actually.”

The service plans to buy at least 100 Raiders over the program of record. The first B-21s are currently under construction at Northrop’s production facilities in Palmdale, Calif., and the program is on track for a first flight next year. But despite the ramp up in activities, Kendall warned that the program may continue to be as secretive as it ever was.

“You’re definitely not going to see much of it,” he said. “I’ve told you about all that’s going to be publicly revealed. We don’t want to give our enemies a head start on any of this.”