The U.S. Air Force will have to prioritize the sustainability of its new Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) drones if it’s to ensure they are an effective “additive” to the force. This is the conclusion of Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel, Director of Force Design, Integration, and Wargaming and Deputy Chief of Staff for Air Force Futures, who also called for a significant degree of shared components between the first increment of CCA drones, which comprises the General Atomics YFQ-42A and the Anduril YFQ-44A. The topic of maintenance, logistics, and sustainment of CCAs, including a heavier focus on commercial-off-the-shelf components, is something we have addressed in the past.
Kunkel was speaking as a guest at the rollout of the Mitchell Institute’s latest research study, authored by Air Force Col. Mark A. Gunzinger (ret.), Director of Future Concepts and Capability Assessments. Based on a series of wargames, the study looks at the logistics requirements for Air Force CCAs in combat scenarios.
Ultimately, Kunkel said, the CCAs will only be of real value as combat mass as long as they can be kept flying at high rates, either alongside crewed fighters or flying missions alone. In this way, the adversary will be forced to respond to their presence, generating sorties and expending weapons in their effort to counter them.
While that is one of the main reasons behind developing the CCAs in the first place, it does impose a significant logistics burden, Kunkel observed.
Even without the demands of making its CCAs suitable for distributed operations, these drones will come with a significant logistics burden, simply due to their number.
The service expects to buy between 100 and 150 Increment 1 CCAs, but has said in the past that it could ultimately acquire at least a thousand of the drones across all of the program’s increments.
The goal, according to Kunkel, is to have CCAs that are able to operate for hundreds of hours without needing significant maintenance work. This becomes especially important when operating from forward locations, as is the expectation of future conflicts, notably in the Pacific theater. The drones are being designed from the outset to make them suitable for concepts of distributed and disaggregated operations, something also referred to as Agile Combat Employment (ACE).
Kunkel highlighted the relevance of this concept to the new drones: “[With] an ability to position CCAs and posture them in different places in a theater, you can increase the complexity of the picture that our adversary sees dramatically … increasing dilemmas for the adversary, increasing the complexity of the picture that they’re going to see, increasing the complexity of what it takes for them to counter us.”
In the past, Kunkel has described the Air Force CCAs as “the first aircraft that we have developed specifically for ACE.”
Reflecting these concerns, Kunkel said he has already had talks with General Atomics and Anduril, with a view to reducing the number of different components in the company’s CCA designs. This would also seem to indicate that the Air Force currently plans to buy a mix of YF-42As and YF-44As, under Increment 1, although that could still change.
Kunkel noted that he has encouraged those firms to explore “motors that are the same, controls that are the same, actuators, tires … those types of things that we need,” to make it easier to sustain CCAs once deployed.
“They don’t necessarily have to be the same aircraft, but certainly many of the components need to be the same,” Kunkel added.
Meanwhile, the increased use of “condition-based maintenance” should help reduce the maintenance demands involved in CCA operations by alerting ground crews early to any looming issues.
Already, we have explored the Air Force’s ambition for its CCAs to make greater use of commercial-off-the-shelf components than the service’s existing crewed and uncrewed platforms.
On the other hand, Gunzinger proposed a somewhat different approach to dealing with maintenance issues, namely by fielding more expendable CCAs, with the idea of less-exquisite and cheaper drones in future increments gaining some traction recently.
“CCAs do not need to be anywhere near as reliable or have as large a mean time between failure as crewed aircraft,” Gunzinger contended. “If it’s a recoverable CCA that might fly 10, 15, or 20 sorties, there are still lower costs.”
Gunzinger raised the scenario of some kind of mechanical failure keeping a CCA on the ground in the middle of the fight. “We can push it off the side of the runway … because we don’t have time, we don’t have resources to get around and repair that CCA on the ground, increasing the time our airmen are on the ground, and possibly vulnerable.”
For Kunkel, another important reason for ensuring as much subsystem commonality as possible is the sheer number of different CCA drone variants that are currently planned.
According to Gunzinger, the wargames involved 16 different variants, reflecting the wide spectrum of missions the CCAs are expected to undertake.
While the Increment 1 CCAs are expected to work closely together with crewed combat jets primarily in the air-to-air combat role, at least initially, they will also be used as electronic warfare platforms and sensor nodes, further augmenting crewed platforms. There is also significant potential for the drones to fulfill roles additional to these: intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions have also been discussed.
Another mission that was included in the recent wargames was logistic support, in which the CCAs would move ammunition and supplies around different forward operating locations.
This reflects Air Force experiments involving MQ-9 Reaper drones, deployed in small packages to forward locations under the Rapid Reaper concept. For the MQ-9, General Atomics helped develop a ‘kit’ to assist with deploying and sustaining those drones within the ACE construct. Future CCAs, like the Reapers, could be adapted to carry small cargoes in travel pods under their wings, or in internal payload bays.
With so many different versions of the CCA likely to be fielded, the Air Force will need to avoid having different sets of logistics trains to support them. In particular, weapons, refueling equipment, other ground equipment, and loading equipment should be common for CCAs, as far as is possible, Gunzinger said.
Even with existing crewed aircraft, the demands of specialized maintenance and logistics, as well as the need for more bespoke equipment on the ground to support flight operations, have been significant challenges for the Air Force when it comes to implementing the ACE concepts.
When it comes to optimizing the CCAs for combat operations from forward locations, Kunkel pointed to the utility of drones that can operate free from the constraints of traditional airbases, including being fully independent of runways.
“We know that the adversary is going to try and target our bases,” Kunkel added, in an obvious reference to China. “For the last 30 years, they’ve developed a rocket force. They’ve developed cruise missiles and ballistic missiles, and all these things are meant to counter our bases, meant to keep us from reliably generating combat power from bases.”
Putting CCAs at forward locations is “one of the ways to thin out the adversary’s mass … and the logistics pipeline of CCA is less complex” than for crewed aircraft. Compared with a traditional combat aircraft that likely requires complex logistical pipelines, long runways, and extensive infrastructure, all of which are vulnerable, CCAs are “being specifically built so you can put them in a lot of different places. And if you can put them in a lot of different places, you can create a tremendous ground picture that an adversary has to attack if they’re going to be successful. Increasing the number of ground targets for an adversary, I think, is just as important as increasing the number of air targets.”
Kunkel noted that for certain roles, CCAs would need a conventional takeoff and landing (CTOL) capability, but that short or vertical takeoff “is something that we need to look at” in future CCA increments.
“As you look at how we generate combat power, and the number of sites we can use … there’s something to a shorter takeoff length,” Kunkel said. “We’ve got to figure out what that takes because, generally, when you do a vertical takeoff aircraft, you decrease the payload, you decrease the range. There’s a balance that we need to strike here.”
In addition to potential STOL and VTOL capabilities for future CCA increments, Kunkel also suggested that some of these drones could potentially be launched from other aircraft.
Clearly, the Air Force is very much still in the process of working out how best to utilize its CCAs and what kinds of missions they should be used for. It’s also notable that the promise of these drones to augment crewed combat aircraft, making them more lethal and flexible in the process, is also tempered by the potentially challenging logistics requirements that will come with them. These challenges will become greater the more different mission sets are taken on and as the different increments and versions of the drone diversify. It will therefore be critical to strike a balance between fielding CCAs with a range of capabilities and meeting the requirements of operating from forward locations with limited support.
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