Bill Sweetman
‘Listening to new options’, according to a senior civilian advisor, is a key piece of the U.S. Air Force process of force redesign.
One of those options is using the fighter-like drones that will come from the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program, which was central to a panel discussion at the U.S. Mitchell Institute’s Air Power Futures Forum in November. Another is a tighter focus on electromagnetic spectrum operations (EMSO), the currently favored term for electromagnetic warfare (EW) and related activities.
CCAs, formerly called loyal wingmen, will be much cheaper than crewed fighters and are intended to work with them and enhance their value—for example, by moving forward to detect targets. EMSO encompasses such decisive effects as seeing what is going on in a battle while blinding or deceiving the enemy’s sensors, foiling the guidance of its weapons, and disrupting its communications while preserving one’s own.
Both designs chosen for the CCA program’s Increment 1, from General Atomics and Anduril, have passed critical design review, according to Colonel Timothy Helfrich, cyber systems lead in Air Force Material Command. The project is ‘ahead in some areas’ of an overall objective to achieve initial operational capability by the end of the decade, he said—because demands had been relaxed where necessary. ‘We need to be able to know when good enough is enough. Instead of adding features, we have made tough decisions.’
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