One forerunner of the US Air Force Collaborative Combat Aircraft is this Australian Loyal Wingman drone, the Boeing Ghost Bat, seen here at RAAF Base Amberley. (Colin Clark/Breaking Defense)
REAGAN NATIONAL DEFENSE FORUM — The Pentagon’s high-tech unmanned wingman project could face a serious delay of up to a year if Congress does not pass a full budget soon, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall warned today.
The effort, formally known as the Collaborative Combat Aircraft, is one of the service’s priority efforts. But it’s just one of the items that will face headwinds should Congress finalize a budget before the Feb. 2 deadline and instead keeps going with a a stopgap Continuing Resolution, which holds spending steady at prior-year levels but largely prohibits starting new programs or ramping up existing ones.
“If we could just get a ’24 budget, we could get going on it,” Kendall said ruefully of CCA, after Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf praised the program as “the brightest spot” in a Defense Department that has struggled to implement AI on a large scale. The two men were part of a panel at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, Calif., an annual gathering of defense officials, experts, and industry leaders.
Kendall launched CCA two years ago to exploit AI to even the odds between US airpower, with its global commitments, and Chinese forces that can focus on Taiwan. His goal is an unmanned system smart enough to work in teams — supervised by a human pilot in a manned aircraft — but cheaper than a modern fighter jet. The Air Force asked for $392 million for CCA in its FY24 request.
“I was gambling a little bit” on the technology maturing fast enough, Kendall told the Reagan Forum, “but I was gambling based on what I’ve seen with the DARPA ACES program, the Air Force’s SkyBorg program, and the loyal wingman program that Boeing was doing with Australia. And I was confident that we were close enough that we could make a commitment [of] several billion dollars in the FYDP” – the Five Year Defense Plan for 2023-2028.
“We’ve already found some ways to get some of this work started. It’s underway,” Kendall continued, “but we desperately need the ’24 funding to keep it going.”
“We are in a race for technological superiority with an adversary who is doing a very good job of competing with us and we cannot waste time,” he warned of China. “The loss of time, just from when we started this concept, when we came up with the idea, to today is two years.
“If we don’t get a ’24 budget we may lose another year,” he said. “That is an enormous head start to give somebody else — and don’t think the other guys aren’t paying attention and aren’t well aware of this. One of the things that impressed me about China, in particular, is their willingness to innovate and their willingness to do things that are non-traditional.”
“Everything that has happened since the decision to go in this direction two years ago reinforces my perception that it was the right choice,” he said. “We just need to get the resources and get on with it.”
“We just need the money,” he said. “I lose sleep, frankly, that ’24 won’t pass, and then we won’t get we requested in ’24. It is my single biggest worry right now.”
Other Programs At Risk
CCA is hardly the only cutting-edge program that would be held up, however. Another, less photogenic priority is Joint All-Domain Command & Control. In essence, JADC2 is an AI-powered battle network that will connect hundreds of manned and unmanned aircraft, ships, satellites, and ground vehicles across air, sea, land, space, and cyberspace so they can share targeting data and coordinate strikes too quickly for an adversary to counter.
JADC2 emerged as a concept during the Trump Administration but remained largely “aspirational,” Kendall said: “We were doing experimentation, which is fine, and were developing some of the piece parts that were necessary to create an operational capability — but nobody had defined what it was we were actually going to do, and nobody had figured out how to actually get there.”
“You have to define a reasonable technical goal that’s achievable, that’s quantifiable, and then set out to build that,” Kendall continued. So as Air Force Secretary, he appointed a one-star Executive Officer, Brig. Gen. Luke Cropsey, to push JADC2 in the Air and Space Forces (both of which fall under Kendall’s oversight). “I tell him repeatedly that he has the hardest job I’ve ever given anybody,” he said.
“Luke is making great progress,” Kendall continued. To build on that momentum, the funding for JADC2 is set to double in the 2024 budget — the same budget that’s now in limbo.
“I’m going to come back to a theme now,” Kendall said. “He will not make that progress if we don’t get that money. If we’re gonna take advantage of AI… we’ve got to put the resources against it, invest in real products, so you’re gonna give us real operational capability.”
“I think we’ve got a good solid path to do that, similar to the CCA — but again, we’ve got to get the resources,” Kendall said.
