DAYTON, Ohio — The Air Force has selected five companies to build the autonomous systems that will serve as the foundation for the first batch of unmanned collaborative fighter jets, according to Air Force officials.
The Air Force quietly awarded the contracts to the companies several months ago, Gen. Jason Voorheis told reporters at Air Force Life Cycle Industry Day on Monday in Dayton, Ohio, but he declined to reveal the names of the selected companies due to security concerns.
Forhes, program executive officer for fighter and advanced aircraft, described the autonomous systems package as the “brains” of the Air Force’s future Joint Combat Aircraft (CCA) fleet. The system is designed to serve as an unmanned wingman to fly alongside manned fighters such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and perform a variety of missions including strike, reconnaissance and electronic warfare.
The Navy plans to field at least 1,000 CCAs by the late 2030s. It will be done in stagesEach batch incorporates different features.
In April, the Air Force General Atomics and Anduril were contracted to build the first incremental prototypes of the aircraft.The two companies plan to develop production test vehicles, and Voorheis said both are on track to do so. Both companies plan to work closely with Increment 1’s autonomy vendor to ensure the hardware and software systems are properly integrated.
The Air Force plans to award a production contract for Increment 1 through competitive bidding as soon as 2026. Forhes said the Air Force could buy aircraft from both vendors or choose a system from another company. If it chooses multiple aircraft, he noted, procurement likely won’t be a 50-50 split.
“We’re not going into this with the idea of an equal split,” he said. “It’s going to be entirely dependent on the performance of each vendor and the capabilities that are needed by the ministries, joint partners and international partners.”
The agency has selected hardware and software developers from an existing consortium of potential CCA vendors, and future expansions of the program will draw from that base as well as from outside companies.
“We want to solidify that market so that in the future, whether it’s a foreign partner, a collaborative partner, or even CCA Increment 2, there will be autonomy vendors in the market whose products we can leverage in the future,” Voorheis said.
In parallel with the work on Increment 1, Forhes and his team are working to define the capabilities needed for the next series of aircraft. They plan to refine the requirements in the coming months, with a contract to be awarded by 2025, Col. Timothy Helfrich, senior materiel lead for advanced aircraft, said in the same meeting with reporters.
Helfrich’s office recently held an industry briefing where he detailed the timeline for Increment 2 as well as some of the capability options the service is considering, the details of which are classified.
The Air Force also hopes to engage foreign partners in future CCA discussions. Forhes said this could include foreign military sales opportunities for Increment 1 aircraft, and he expects U.S. allies to work closely with the CCA team to define Increment 2 capabilities and potentially even co-produce aircraft.
“We are just beginning to build bilateral and multilateral relationships, and it will be this fall before we can gauge what the real interests of each partner are and determine who will work with us and who will not,” he said, “but it will certainly include our closest allies.”
Courtney Albon is a space and emerging technology reporter for C4ISRNET. She has covered the U.S. military since 2012, focusing on the Air Force and Space Force. She has reported on some of the Department of Defense’s most significant acquisition, budget and policy challenges.
