Lockheed investing $100M into F-35 controlled combat drones under 'Project Carrera'

A rendering of a drone flying into battle alongside an F-35. (Lockheed Martin)

WASHINGTON — On a battlefield a decade or so in the future, a C-130 drops a pallet loaded with small, expendable drones, which break off and immediately begin flying toward a formation of F-35s.

As the F-35 pilots fly toward an enemy surface-to-air missile site, they issue commands to the drones under their control: “Collect data,” “go forward and draw fire,” or “find this target.” Based on data gathered by some of the drones, the pilots are alerted to a probable threat, and an alternate route is suggested using information from other drones that have scouted ahead.

This is the kind of technology Lockheed Martin hopes to prove out in its newly-revealed “Project Carrera,” a multi-year investment wherein the company plans to sink $100 million of its own money into drones, artificial intelligence, upgrades to the F-35 and novel communications technologies that will connect all the pieces together, John Clark, vice president of Lockheed’s secretive Skunk Works advanced development cell, said during a briefing to reporters on Wednesday.

The upcoming demonstrations will see an F-35 pair with up “a network” of Lockheed’s Speed Racer drones, an expendable aircraft the company disclosed in 2020. However, the most significant element of the effort will concentrate on figuring out how fighter pilots can actually operate drones in the field, what advantages those drones can confer for human pilots, and how to establish trust between human pilots and the AI guiding the drones.

“This is not going to be a one-off stunt where, ‘Hey, look, we’ve connected an F-35 to this uncrewed system, and we passed a track and yay, success, we now have a media headline that says that we did crewed-uncrewed teaming,’” Clark said. “What we’re really focusing on is a systematic build up where we can evaluate that human and uncrewed system interaction, and understand how those behaviors build up over time.”

Lockheed’s $100 million investment in Project Carrera is split into three areas:

$20 million for upgrades to the F-35 and for the development of uncrewed assets
$42 million for “teaming enablers” that include AI development, net-enabled pylons, advanced waveforms such as 5G, and open architecture technology
$38 million for “battlespace multipliers,” an interesting pot of money that includes low-Earth orbit satellites that will provide beyond line-of-sight communications between the fighter and drones, as well as “forward survivable platforms” that could include a “penetrating sensor”

Clark said Project Carrera will inform what Lockheed eventually proposes for the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) effort, an assortment of uncrewed combat drone that will augment the F-35, F-22 and the upcoming sixth-generation fighter slated to be the centerpiece of the Next Generation Air Dominance family of systems.

Last week, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said that the service could begin a CCA competition as early as fiscal 2024. At the same time, the Air Force must also take steps to figure out how to integrate combat drones with normal fighter operations, said Kendall, who added that the service could pursue demonstrations where fighter squadrons experimented with some of the unmanned systems already on the market.

“You’d be employing an integrated unit at sub scale,” Kendall said. “You’d be integrating these [drones] with existing aircraft in a way which sort of prove out some of the tactics, techniques and procedures, as well as things like maintenance concepts …and organizational structures.”

Go, Speed Racer, Go

Project Carrera’s early flight tests will focus on demonstrating Speed Racer’s airworthiness, starting with captive carry tests (Clark declined to say which aircraft will be carrying Speed Racer, or when flight tests will begin). Then Speed Racer will make its first flight, which will demonstrate whether it can be successfully launched from an aircraft and allow Lockheed to assess its performance characteristics. From there, Lockheed will conduct tests where an F-35 controls one — and then multiple — Speed Racer drones.

However, Clark stressed that the effort is more ambitious than simply proving that fighter jet and drones can operate within the same airspace.

“If you’re playing chess, you don’t want to put all your pawns on the back row, and leave the king and the queen exposed on the front row,” he said. “Just following fighters around is not an effective way to defeat a near peer adversary. You really have to have that ability to push in front of the fighters to either stimulate the integrated air defenses of the adversary, or you have to be providing information that the onboard systems of a fighter can’t organically get themselves.”

Key to Project Carrera is the idea of “flexible autonomy,” an AI brain for unmanned systems that can adapt to the needs and preferences of the user. In Lockheed’s early experiments with autonomous systems during the late 2000s, “we automated everything, and basically, the mission would unfold, and the user would watch this and there would be a lot of feedback of ‘Why did it do that? I don’t understand that. I wish it would have done that [instead],’” said Clark. “There was no easy way for them to interject or drive what the warfighter thought should be happening with the set of autonomous systems.”

In contrast, a flexible autonomy framework will allow the user to decide how much control they have over the uncrewed system at any point of a mission. Pilots with years of experience and a high level of comfort in the cockpit of a fighter can direct every action of the drones under his or her command, while a more novice pilot could opt to take a more hands-off approach.

“The underlying behaviors, the autonomy, the way in which the rest of the ecosystem works together — that is exactly what we want to uncover in these series of experiments, to understand how you would actually field this type of capability,” he said. “Candidly, as we watch the rest of the environment, this is an area that’s not getting as much focus as it should. We’ve got a lot of folks that are emphasizing, ‘Here’s my pretty vehicle.’”

While Speed Racer will take a starring role in Project Carrera, Lockheed also intends to demonstrate other air vehicles and classified payloads during the tests. Speed Racer is slated to cost “considerably less than $2 million” per copy and is currently designed to be expendable, Clark said. However, Lockheed is also making investments in mid- and high-tier drones that could also be offered for the CCA program.