The challenges of the 21st century are too great for any nation to tackle them alone—especially in the realm of defense and security.
That’s why interest among responsible powers is growing in collaboration generally but also with advanced new programs specifically. A case in point is with collaborative combat aircraft, known as CCAs.
These highly capable autonomous unmanned fighters are set to revolutionize air dominance and other fields in the coming decades. Understanding how will also help explain allied nations’ desire to work together on building them.
One of the chief problems in airpower today for peaceful and responsible nations is that of numbers, or “mass,” as tacticians sometimes call it: How many aircraft can one side put up against another to gain control of the skies. That control is essential to nearly everything else about what follows in an engagement as countless conflicts have shown. Rule the skies and you rule the battlefield. Without that control, everything else becomes difficult if not impossible.
So, when allied nations contemplate a challenge from a revanchist aggressor, one that might use force to attempt to conquer a neighboring nation, air superiority is high on the list of problems to solve quickly. And as the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, and others look at prospective conflicts in the coming years, they face advanced adversaries that already dispose of more mass. The numbers game is lost.
The U.S. military and its partners and allies can’t equalize or take the lead in numbers of traditional human-flown fighters. It would cost too much and take too long. So, they’ve resolved to even the odds in a different way.
CCAs are part of that answer. Built in large numbers and designed to operate alongside or, more likely, far forward of traditional aircraft combat formations, these aircraft let the U.S. and its allies draw ahead in mass. By deploying two, three, four, or more CCAs with every legacy fighter, the allied nations make each combat aircraft twice, triple, or four times more effective, including with new capabilities that wouldn’t have been possible before.
Large numbers of CCAs working as a sensor net, for example, can look deeply into contested territory and perceive things that no single aircraft could. These multiple different reinforcing perspectives are especially helpful against low-observable threats, which were designed to evade head-on detection but which are easier to spot when multiple sensors are looking from multiple angles.
In this way, formations of CCAs and traditional combat aircraft can restore deterrence against the largest and most advanced adversaries and shore up the airpower advantage on the side of responsible nations. And if deterrence were to fail, the CCAs would be poised to help take direct action in response to threats, including with air-to-air ordnance if necessary.
Another advantage of this approach is that putting unmanned aircraft forward—and having them be the first contact with hostile forces—also permits the human pilots to stay safely back from danger.
It sounds like science fiction, but it’s real—and it’s here. This is why Washington, London, Canberra, Tokyo, and other capitals are negotiating how to share the technology and the production for their common benefit.
Leading the way in terms of design and production is the San Diego-based contractor General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GA-ASI). Having delivered more than 1,100 unmanned aircraft for more than 30 years—which together have recorded nearly 9 million flight hours—GA-ASI is the world leader in unmanned aviation. It’s no surprise then that it’s out in front on CCAs as well.
This year, GA-ASI was one of two vendors selected to submit production-representative CCA aircraft designs to the U.S. Air Force as part of its ongoing development process. One virtue of the company’s concept is that it’s highly producible in large volumes. If the U.S. government concluded agreements with other countries interested in CCA collaboration, those nations could begin building their own copies of the aircraft in comparatively short order.
That, in turn, would produce a wave of common new aircraft and huge new capability for the United States and its allies and partners, which would enable them to work together to bring overwhelming new combat power against any prospective aggressors. International collaboration on CCAs, in short, represents the opportunity for a major strategic turning point.
Achieving this will require diplomacy among the allied powers and agreements on setting the details for the burden-sharing. The technological side, meanwhile, is going well and progressing steadily.
GA-ASI has two types of unmanned combat jets flying today. One is an Air Force Research Laboratory aircraft, the XQ-67A Off-Board Sensing Station. The others are the company’s MQ-20 Avenger® aircraft, which have logged tens of thousands of flight hours.
These aircraft are important because they represent the advanced state of the aircraft hardware as well as the vital supporting software and control systems that will make CCAs work. Avenger has logged milestone after aviation milestone in tests of combat aircraft autonomy.
Autonomous Avengers have flown singly and in large groups with both other unmanned aircraft and traditional fighters. They’ve shown they can handle both real in-the-air combat scenarios as well as those simulated virtually. The autonomy software and control functions that power Avenger show that these aircraft can take missions on their own or alongside larger formations in the same ways envisaged for tomorrow’s CCAs.
Achieving the vision and strategic inflection point represented by international collaboration on CCAs can’t happen overnight. Sovereign nations must weigh their own objectives along those of their partners and allies as they assess how to move forward. The good news is that when the diplomatic situation has reached a point that international CCA programs can move forward, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems will be sure the technology remains ready.
