2024 Air, Space & Cyber: Collaborative Combat Aircraft

The “Collaborative Combat Aircraft” panel at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference featured Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel, director of Air Force Force Design, Integration, and Wargaming; Dave Alexander, president of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc.; Robert Winkler, vice president of corporate development and national security programs at Kratos Defense and Security Solutions; and Jason Levin, Ph.D., senior vice president for air dominance and strike at Anduril Industries, with Mark Gunzinger, director of future concepts and capability assessments at AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, serving as moderator. Watch the video below:

Panel Moderator: Mark Gunzinger, Director, Future Concepts & Capability Assessments, AFA Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies:

So good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Mitchell Institute’s panel on the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft. So, I’m Mark Gunzinger, Mitchell’s director for future concepts and capability assessments. I think we all realize that our nation is now facing unprecedented array of security challenges. You’ve heard that for two days now.

So simultaneously defending our homeland, deterring peer adversaries, addressing threats from rogue states and the terrorist groups that they sponsor has created requirements for air power that our Air Force cannot provide today. Our Air Force also remains woefully underfunded. And after decades of downsizing and deferred recapitalization, it must now modernize nearly all of its major weapon’s systems. And this is an enterprise-wide challenge that spans core mission areas, air security, long range strike, battle management, command and control, ISR, nuclear deterrents, et cetera.

Yes, the Air Force is taking some major steps towards addressing those challenges by creating a new force design and prioritizing right resources for its operational imperatives. And innovative capabilities like M series munitions and CCA will be critical to realizing that new force design.

So, to discuss the promise of CCA, we’re fortunate to be joined by four incredible Air Force and industry leaders. So please welcome Major General Joseph Kunkel, the Air Force’s director of force design, integration and wargaming.

Our next panelist is Mr. David Alexander, president of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. So, we’re also pleased to welcome Mr. Robert Otis Winkler from Kratos Defense where he is vice president for National Security Programs, Otis. And finally, we’re fortunate that Jason Levin, senior vice president for engineering at Anduril can join us today.

So, we’ve got a lot to cover. We’re going to jump right into questions for our distinguished panelists. Let’s start with General Kunkel. CCA has emerged as a cornerstone of the Air Force’s future force design and they’re obviously a major focus for the chief and Secretary Kendall. Could you please share your perspective on how and why a CCA would be critical to realizing the force design, how they’re going to help fill capability requirements that are outlined in the operational preparedness?

Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel, Director, Air Force Design, Integration and Wargaming:

Yeah, happy to do so and thanks so much for the introduction and great to see so many friends and airmen that are going to be the beneficiaries of this force design that we are building right now that will result in war-winning capabilities like we’ve had for the last 30 years. We’ll continue to dominate combat areas all over the world.

But specific, and I want to take just a little step back on force design and just a couple of thoughts that we’re having. One, the definition of combat success and platforms that yield combat success in the past was really been this platform-level integration. And if you had the best F-15 and you have the best E-3 and you had the best F-22, and you had the best B-2, you could bring those out to the battlefield and the integration between them wasn’t as important as what actually happened on the platform.

In the future and what we’re thinking about with force design is this thought of system-level of integration. And it’s been said a couple of times throughout the week, systems-level integration and CCAs are a part of that NGAD family of systems or the Next Generation Air Dominance or how we think we will achieve air superiority in the future. And achieving air superiority in the future that CCA is going to be a vital part of that system. And the analysis that we’ve conducted shows that CCAs are game-changing as part of that system that includes other capabilities.

So CCAs are with us. It’s something that we’ve been thinking about. This was, in 2024 we did a lot of analysis that resulted in the CCA we have now. But thoughts on CCAs have been evolving for many, many years and it’s going to be an important part of our force design and how we win in the future.

Panel Moderator: Mark Gunzinger:

Excellent. Great start. General, let me follow up with another question. CCAs have the potential to perform wide range of roles and tests. I think most people think of them still as well, these are going to be loyal wingmen that are a slave to crude aircraft, performing more like fighters would. But yet, wargames and other analyses said there’s much greater potential for CCA to perform as electronic warfare systems, comm relays, remote network sensors, create effects that can extend the Air Force reach well into highly contested areas. So, could you address some of those priority mission sets or Increment 1 and then talk about perhaps how that might change over time as Increment 2 and beyond mature?

Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:

Yeah, happy to do so. When we did our analysis and looked at CCA and the missions that CCAs would conduct or could conduct, they spanned all those things that you talked about. When we were trying to narrow down what we needed to do for the first tranche or the first increment, we looked at what had the most impact on the battlefield. And the version of the CCA that had the most impact on the battlefield was, frankly, a missile truck, something that could perform this air-to-air mission and be part of this system that produces or achieves air superiority. So that’s why we went with the CCA that we have now. As we expand, and frankly what was important to us was speed to field, something that can have an impact on a battlefield. And that’s exactly how we went and approach CCA Increment 1. And I think we can probably have other panelists talk through speed to field and how we got there.

When we look at CCA Increment 2 and where we’re going in the future, those additional mission sets like electronic attack, like a resilient sensing grid, other weapons expanding the choices of weapons, those I’m certain will be added. As well as different styles of sustainment and takeoff and landing, those types of things.

But for this first instrument, it was just important to go with let’s do something that can kinetically dominate the battlefield and that’s where we went, understanding that there’s room to grow in the future.

Panel Moderator: Mark Gunzinger:

Excellent. Yeah, harvesting their disruptive potential to create dilemmas for our adversaries. That’s excellent.

So, this is for all our panelists, Secretary Kendall and other Air Force leaders have said there’s a need to achieve the right balance and capabilities and long-range strike and other systems as well is what CCA are going to bring to the fight.

But the right balance includes the balance of their affordably, they must be affordable. And finding that sweet spot in our future force design, finding that sweet spot for CCA is going to be very important to, as Kendall has said, dramatically increase the cost-effectiveness of our force as well as war fighting effectiveness. So, what are your thoughts, your take on that balance and what are your approaches to achieving it?

Dave Alexander, President, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc.:

Here we go. Yeah, good morning, everybody. Before I get right into that question, just a little bit about General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. We’re unmanned aircraft OEM, if you’re not familiar with us and we’re a national asset I believe, to the country. We’ve delivered more kinetics than any other unmanned aircraft that’s out there, 8.5 million flight hours to date. 90% of that has been in combat. We’ve delivered 1200 aircraft at a peak of nine aircraft a month. So, we’re up and running and we’re ready to go.

Right now, we’re operating out of 80 locations around the world and as we speak, 70 of our aircraft are flying every second of every day. So, we’re up, we’ve been around, we’ve got a little over 5 million square feet of facilities ready to go to bring this program to full rate.

So, there’s a lot of talk about it being nontraditional with my partner up here on stage. And I would say General Atomics Aeronautical Systems is not your typical aerospace company. We’re privately held, and we have one chairman, he’s Neal Blue, he’s a patriot to the country and invests right back into the products that are delivered.

So anyway, 30 years dedicated, 100% unmanned aircraft, agility, pedigree, honesty, that’s what we’re about. And make sure you stop by our booth. It’s booth 734 for everybody and that’s where the first flying combat aircraft is right now. Flew last, this February and we’ve had many flights since then.

So, the answer, the balance survivability piece and how do you blend all that in there? Obviously, you don’t want to have these aircraft get out there and just get all shot down. And obviously you don’t want them to be silver bullets where they cost so much that you can’t afford to lose them. So, there is a right balance, and we call it balance survivability where it’s right blend of onboard, off-board and organic survivability treatments and methods such that you have a high probability getting the aircraft back without driving the cost through the ceiling such that you’re afraid to have affordable mass. And I think that’s really what we’re after, is affordable mass. So, there’s a knee in a curve where that happens, and I think everything you see on the floor today is pretty much hitting that sweet spot for balance survivability.

Robert Winkler, VP of Corporate Development & National Security Programs, Kratos Defense & Security Solutions:

Excellent. Yeah, so obviously for affordability you still have to have common effectiveness in order to get the mission accomplished, right? And the United States of America knows how to build survivable aircraft better than anybody else in the planet. The question is how do you make those survivable aircraft now affordable? And you do that by not designing the CCAs to be a manned aircraft. You do it by designing in the affordability from the get-go. And I think everybody up here has understands that and is working hard in order to make that happen.

If you take a manned aircraft, normally we buy aircraft by the pound, for fighters and ISR, they normally cost somewhere between 4,000 and $6,000 a pound. Through the great works from AFRL and from LCMC, they’ve done a bunch of studies over the last 10, 15 years, designed prototypes, actually prototypes that are flying, and they’ve got the baseline now according to AFRL, is they’re down to $1,200 a pound for CCA type equipment. And then everybody’s working hard to get even below a $1000 a pound, right? Some companies are up advertising six to $800 a pound. That’s how you get the affordability at the same time that you get the survivability.

On top of that, the major cost of this is going to be mission systems. We design awesome, United States Air Force industry designs the best weapons sensors on the planet. We also design the best radars for manned aircraft, the best EOIR, the best ISR balls. What we don’t have is in the middle. We don’t have something that fit, that can be used multiple times but isn’t an exquisite sensor and we need to get to that part as well to bring that on the cost even more.

And then when we talk about survivability, survivability in the air is one thing, but we shouldn’t lose fact that we have to have survivability on the ground. We had a great discussion, a history discussion actually, downstairs last night that talked about, we, the United States of America have not defeated other, our adversaries air forces in the air. We defeat them by attacking them on the ground. And so don’t lose sight of the fact that we have to work through the survivability on the ground either.

Jason Levin, PhD, Senior VP Air Dominance & Strike, Anduril Industries:

So, first of all, thanks for having me, really honored to be here, really excited to talk about CCA mean. This is an awesome project, and we think about development at Anduril, we really like to partner with our customers and find what is the simplest solution that we can get into the field quickly? We want to have openness, modularity, and then for CCA to bring this into account, we’re really leveraging a lot of the government reference architectures, open systems architectures. They provide a nice framework where we can have the ability to upgrade and iterate so we can field something quickly, make it affordable, and then iterate and increase performance over time without a big cost burden.

The other thing we like to think about when doing development to get something fielded quickly is identify what are key risks? What are challenges? How can we get after them super early? And we had a lot of success with this on a product we call Roadrunner. This is a recoverable surface-to-air interceptor, where we partnered with the customer, very early we got a prototype flying, we could burn down risk on things like vertical takeoff and landing, transition to forward flight, maneuverability while at the same time, working on all the other hard problems in parallel. Things like the seeker, work on the sensor, the algorithm, the hardware. And we could iterate, we could fail early, and we could partner with the customer to make trades across cost, performance, schedule. And this really allowed us the ability to go from a napkin sketch to a combat-validated system in under two years. This is unprecedented for this type of system.

And so, we’re trying to think about the same way to do CCA. How do we identify the key challenges early and how do we get after them? So, we’ve looked at things like landing gear, we’ve already talked about mission systems integration and how can we get after that very early? And so typically landing gear is a challenge on programs, ends up on critical path. And I mean Anduril, we’ve never built a landing gear for this class of aircraft. So, we wanted to do that very early. We designed, built, tested this landing gear in under six months and now the landing gear team has time to iterate. They’re outpacing the rest of the air vehicle. Something that’s kind of uncommon in these programs.

Same on mission systems, right? The nations never fielded an autonomous system this complex. So, we wanted to get those mission systems into the lab, get the compute, data links, payloads, sensors, get it all hooked up in actual hardware and surrogates, pull that mission thread all the way from user interaction to mission effect so we could iterate on ICDs, iterate on the hardware, find cost efficiencies across the system.

And lastly, we talk about fielding affordable mass. Producibility at scale is critical to this. So, our landing gear is very simple, it’s a very producible design. Rather than going to the small handful of vendors that you would typically go to, we can leverage the thousands of machine shops across this country. This allows us to move quickly. We can go into prototype quickly. We’ll also have a very robust supply chain where we can scale for mass and affordability. And if you kind of think about this same design methodology across every component of CCA, whether it’s the hardware, the software, the integration, the test, I believe we can feel an affordable system on a timely schedule that really impacts this nation.

Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:

Hey, I want to just change maybe the tone of the question a little bit and we talk about this thing called affordable mass, but I want to talk about from a war fighting perspective because this affordable mass, and I don’t really like the term affordable mass and I’ll address that in a second, but it opens up a lot of things when it comes to war fighting and how you’d actually fight a war and the operational approaches you would take in causing dilemmas for our adversaries.

The affordable mass, when we say affordable mass, it’s like it gives this connotation that there’s another alternative out there and that if we could only afford something else, we might do something that was highly exquisite, and we would just buy more of those if we had more money. The reality is with the CCAs, they make a difference on the battlefield, regardless of this affordability target. The affordability target is what makes it really, really unique in that we can buy large numbers of them, and we can have high quantities and it does provide mass. But the benefits of it is it creates dilemmas on the battlefield, both in the air and on the ground. If you have more of these, you can place them in more locations, creating targeting dilemmas, Otis, to the point you were making about on the ground and survivability on the ground.

But in the air, we’ve found in the simulators where we have CCAs actually running, we take more risks. We take more risks with the tactics and things that we wouldn’t do with an airplane that’s got a person in it, we’ll absolutely do with the CCA, and we’ll say, “Hey, good luck little buddy, go on in there. Go tackle this tough problem,” where perhaps we wouldn’t do that with a manned aircraft. And I think that’s one of the unique advantages that the price point creates for us and the fact that it doesn’t have a person in it, you can increase this risk factor, which just opens up a whole bunch when it comes to tactics, operational approach and creating dilemmas for the adversary.

Panel Moderator: Mark Gunzinger:

I couldn’t agree more with our panelists on this. I’ve used the term affordable mass, written papers on it in the past. One thing I find myself having to explain to some people is affordable mass doesn’t mean we’re just trying to generate more combat mass to fight a mass-on-mass war of attrition. That’s not what the Air Force is trying to do. That’s old thing. Maybe that’s the way the Army still intends to fight.

The fact is disrupting the adversary, creating dilemmas, composing costs, achieving the right cost per effect that we create in the battle space. That’s the focus.

So, this is another question for all panelists, it’d be remiss if we didn’t talk a bit about autonomous technologies. Maturing autonomous agents, which are the brains of CCA, that’s going to be absolutely critical to their development and maturation over time. But there are a lot of people who still don’t understand how those agents are going to work, their current limitations, their potential today, not just in the future, and how that’s going to affect their use cases.

So, I’ll ask all the panelists to pine if you’d like, on how you are developing and de-risking CCA autonomy and also building warfighter trust, which is going to be critical to their employment.

Dave Alexander:

So let me go first here and I’d like to thank the general, we’re looking for a name for our aircraft and now we have it, it’s called Little Buddy. So, thanks for that.

Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:

Everyone’s looking for a little buddy to send in. Good luck.

Dave Alexander:

So, bringing the autonomy in is what it’s all about. And so, I think what’s really important right now in parallel with what we’re doing is what we call surrogate testing. So, if you look back for this old skyboard where we’re testing autonomous code and getting it into relevant platforms, I think is really crucial to run in parallel with what we’re doing right now, going productionization and getting the aircraft ready for delivery into formal testing.

So surrogate testing is just going to be huge. So, you can take your modeling and your SIEM and then you can meet that up with a couple real aircraft that are surrogates with the same avionics and everything that you’re interfacing your open mission systems with and really get a jump start on all this. So, if we wait and do everything in series, this program’s going to drag out.

So surrogate testing at General Atomics, we really think that’s really, really important. And the other key is to have airworthiness enclave and autonomous enclave that are separated by a validator such that if you want to load a new mission, you could actually load it in flight and not have to worry about doing something stupid with the airplane. No barrel rolls from the autonomous engine, on day one, anyway. So, it’s that kind of thing, don’t fly in the mountain, don’t fly out of a geospatial area and that validator will allow us to move quick, will allow us to iterate and learn as we go. So, I think in summary, I would say surrogate testing and ability to change autonomy on the fly.

Jason Levin:

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more with Dave. I mean we approached the same thing at Anduril. We’ve been fielding hundreds of autonomous systems for years. We really take a software-first approach. We think about what is the mission, what is the outcome, what are the software components I need to put together to do that? What is the hardware? And from the software, what is the architecture? As Dave’s talking about, how do I have an API-based framework so I can have the openness and modularity? Because the software is always evolving. We’re always updating a software; we’re always pushing new updates to the field. We’re doing that currently on our autonomous systems that are deployed. They’re getting better, more intuitive, more effective.

And then even across autonomy and Dave’s kind of touching on it, there’s several different aspects. There’s the platform autonomy on the air vehicle, make it do things like takeoff and land, fly waypoints. Then you have the mission autonomy. You layer on top of a CCA, a group of CCAs and then produce some mission outcome whether it’s sensing some effect. And then there there’s a bunch of components. You’ve sensor management, sensor fusion, behaviors and tasking and routing. There’s a lot going on.

And so, it’s quite complex and Anduril are working across all these facets of autonomy. But then you also need to think about the life cycle here of autonomy if we’re going to field it. So, there’s the autonomy development, right? Software developers writing code, there’s mission planning, creating the tactics, the ROEs, there’s mission execution, you’re in the fight. And then you got to debrief. We have to iterate; we have to get these learnings back in the system to improve it over time, so it’ll get better and keep pace with the threat.

And then as Dave’s saying, there’s going to be no substitute for live flight. So similarly, we have a fleet of surrogate jets that we fly at our test sites. So, we can take the same autonomy, do it in simulation, hundreds of thousands of runs, push it into the jets and fly at our test site. And we have hundreds of flights, of flying these aircraft in multi-ship formations doing collaborative autonomy. We’re able to get that feedback early and improve the system over time.

Robert Winkler:

So, I think that mission autonomy is really important. We can have autonomous systems that, today we have autonomous systems that go out and do what we would call motherhood. That go take off, landing, navigate, communicate, and come back and return. But the mission autonomy, to do the mission sets that we’re talking about, that’s what you need to have the warfighter build the trust with. And I think the only way that you do that is you get that trust from the warfighter because he’s actually seeing it day to day.

And so, you have to do it on a SIL, you have to do it in digital engineering to iterate really fast to be able to get those data. Then you have to do it internally with your own test units to be able to get up to a level that you can hand it off to the warfighter, but we got to get it in the hands of the warfighter. And the faster you do that, whether it’s in Project Venom that’s going on right now or it’s any other autonomous capability that we have, let’s go out there and get the warfighter, integrate with the warfighter, at least on the Nellis Ranges and learn. You’ll gain more data in a relevant environment that will actually help it go farther and the members of men and women that are going to be using it in combat are going to grow accustomed to it really fast.

Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:

Otis, fantastic segue. And this whole autonomy thing, this is really fun. This is something where we’re learning and when we started thinking about, hey, what do we need to put in the budget? One of the first things we said is we need to get this in the hands of the warfighter as soon as possible. If someone offered you cold Fusion and said, “Hey, here’s some cold Fusion,” what would you do with it? You go, “Oh shoot, I don’t know what I’m going to do with it, but I’m sure it’d be fantastic.” Let’s put it in the hands of warfighters and they’ll figure it out.

And so that’s exactly what we’ve done with CCA, and we’ve stood up an experimental operations unit at Nellis. This is not a test unit, this is an operational unit and the thought is, bring in our warfighters that have some experience with this, bring in warfighters from all different backgrounds. And not only like the flyers that would actually fly and develop tactics but also folks on the ground so we can learn exactly what we need from an autonomy perspective.

And that’s something we’re doing. It’s a unit that’s up and running, put in the hands of warfighters, let airmen experiment with it. And I know that GA and Anduril have both got some thoughts on exactly some of those TTPs, but I think that’s how we train the autonomy.

Interestingly enough, when you look at how we do, let’s just go with pilot training. We’ve got a very structured, you go to pilot training and you train for, well T-37 in my days, and then you go to a T-38 for six months and then you go to introduction to fighter fundamentals and then you go to your F-15 school and then you eventually get to your operational unit and you’re learning each step, okay. How do you do this for autonomy? How do you train the autonomy? These are things we’re learning, and you mentioned it, Venom’s going to be a big piece of that, that the Vanguard Skyborg, we learned something there. But I mean this is completely new for us and it’s going to be game-changing for us and something we’re excited about, and we do have it in the hands of warfighters today.

Panel Moderator: Mark Gunzinger:

Excellent. So again, for all our panelists, we’ve mentioned the S-word, survivability. So, in tabletop exercises and war games that we’ve led at the Mitchell Institute, we found that that’s obviously a key consideration, achieving the balance, affordability, survivability as well as their magazine capacity and so forth.

The problem with weapons carriers, with weapons trucks, as you call them, general, is those CCA will probably need just enough survivability, at least enough survivability to reach their weapons launch points because the Air Force can’t afford to waste weapons. It is weapons inventory limited.

So, I’ll ask the panel, what do you see as some of the baseline design attributes and operating concepts that will give CCA the survivability that’s going to be required to achieve the needed effects in the battle space? Talking classified obviously.

Dave Alexander:

Yeah, unclassified, no, like I mentioned before, I think the key is having the right balance and not going overboard in either direction. So, there’s affordable options you have for onboard, there’s affordable options for off-board survivability and there are treatments organic to the airframe that can be affordable. And then the mere, just the size of the little buddy does help the, it’s how observable it is as well.

So, I would say it’s that balance that we’re using in our modeling and SIEM and I think we’ve nailed the right level. I can’t talk about it here, so it’s really a little bit different, but I can say it includes having enough carriage on your platform to carry things that can help you avoid being shot. That was rough. So yeah, hard to talk any further.

Jason Levin:

Yeah, and when we think about fielding these systems quickly, making them affordable, there’s going to be producibility aspects to that, sustainment aspects to that, and survivability comes into play. I think us, GA, Air Force are all kind of circling a sweet spot there of balancing those things.

The other thing we need to think about with survivability is the sustainment and readiness and any challenges associated there. CCAs need to have as little maintenance as possible. They need to be able to get on the ground, refuel, rearm and get back into the air. And so really got to think hard about survivability when you’re thinking about those things.

Robert Winkler:

Yeah, I think that as you try to balance that out. We should think about the basic premise of the question. We have to protect the weapons because we don’t have enough weapons. Well, let’s flip that on its head. Let’s produce more weapons. And the way to do that is we optimize right now, we design our fifth-generation aircraft and beyond, including CCAs, to be able to carry legacy weapons. And instead of trying to optimize the CCA to carry the legacy weapons, what if you optimize the weapons to be carried by the CCAs? So now you have a much better weapons depth that you don’t have to husband those weapons. You can take the risk that General Kunkel was talking about, right? You can actually get the TTPs out there to provide that risk because you’re not worried that we’re very limited our weapons depth with our current, in this case, air [inaudible 00:30:00] munitions.

And you do that same thing then by CCAs, we talked about a family of systems. So, you only have to have survivability enough to be survivable for the mission you need to accomplish. If the mission you need to accomplish some of the CCAs are not going to be carrying those weapons trucks. And then you don’t have to build in the survivability with those. And that will be iron in the sky that will allow the CCAs that do need to get to a certain point to launch their weapons, to be able to get their mission accomplished as well. So, by providing more capability, you get more weapons effects, and you get better survivability as well.

Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:

I’ll add on to that and I think one of the things that would make it even more survivable is if it didn’t have to fight. And so, if we can create enough of these things that we create dilemmas that deter our adversaries that they go, “Man, this is such a hard problem, we’re not even going to fight,” then it’s really, really survivable. That’s where we’d like to be.

I do think we have a very solid understanding, and we’ve iterated on what we need in terms of survivability for the mission and what it needs to do when it actually engages in air combat. We have a good understanding of that. And like David said, we’re not going to talk about that here. But we do know what it means when we send a little buddy forward and we have the risk that we can take with it and when it can go forward and when it has a really good chance of having mission success, the survivability is a key part of that operational approach.

You talked about it just briefly, but this thought of survivability on the ground is something that we really, really need to look at. And I’ll throw out another new term in there. It’s called ACE-ability. All right? It’s the ability to do agile combat employment, and that’s something that we’ve got to build. We’ve got to build in these systems. The ability to have a limited signature, to be small enough, to be mobile enough to have a sustainable pipeline that doesn’t go all the way back to Marietta, Georgia. You’ve got to be able to sustain these things in the combat zone, to frankly put them in multiple places that does create the multiple dilemmas for adversary when they’re on the ground so they can’t be destroyed on the ground. I think that’s a key area where we’re doing considerable work.

Panel Moderator: Mark Gunzinger

That’s an awesome point, general, and let me pull the thread on that just a little bit. So, Mitchell Institute this year led a tabletop exercise, a look at logistics to sustain CCA operations at scale in the Pacific while under attack, of course.

The punchline out of that was operators and planners from the air force industry concluded that logistics to do that is not an insurmountable problem if the air force industry think about CCA as a force design instead of just an acquisition program and begin to build into its capabilities and ways to reduce the logistics footprint of CCA on the ground, to improve their survivability, relocatability and so forth.

So, I’ll ask our industry partners to perhaps talk about what you are doing to reduce those logistics requirements, turn CCA rapidly and get them off the ground so they’re survivable?

Dave Alexander:

I would say the main thing is, get rid is any kind of scheduled maintenance that’s possible. So obviously you got to put fuel in the aircraft and put oil in the aircraft for the engine, but other than that, I think you really need to design this system that you don’t touch it out in the field. So, when you’re doing your ACE-ability or agile combat employment, you are not out there with a ton of spares and test equipment and have to fix this aircraft.

Another key thing that we’ve learned through the years is minimize the system, keep it simple and keep it all electric. And the all-electric aircraft, the maintenance reduced on that is huge and the reliability goes through the roof. An example, one of our aircraft is flown by a customer that floats 7,080 hours on one tail in one year and the only way to do that is having an aircraft you don’t do maintenance on.

So, the main thing is let’s design these things, so you don’t put wrenches on them. And then let’s design them such that when the mission is important, you have a minimum equipment list, and you can take off with some red warnings to go get the job done.

Jason Levin:

Yeah, totally agree. I mean since early days of Anduril, we’ve been feeling autonomous systems. The whole point is to reduce manpower, add force multiplier. We don’t want to add people with a system. CCA is no different. We need minimize people, minimize infrastructure. And we can think about autonomy there too. Not just autonomy for the mission, but autonomy for the whole life cycle, pre-flight, post-flight, maintenance. How can we make the system as easy and intuitive to operate with and how can we minimize training and the amount of people that need to do things?

So, if you take a software first approach and you bake in the hooks and software and hardware early, you can automate a lot of these things, like checking fuel levels, oil levels. I mean really, people should not have to interact with the jet to get it back in the air.

And same on the hardware side. We want to minimize ground support equipment. We’re going to show up at a nontraditional base, employed through nontraditional means, and we have no specific ground support equipment for our CCA. We’re leveraging a lot of commercial aerospace; business jet components and we ingrain that into our teams to think like a business jet. Business jet takes off from a field, lands on another field, doesn’t get to bring its ground support equipment with it. Has to show up, a 16-year-old puts fuel on the jet and off they go. We’re taking the same mentality as CCA.

Robert Winkler:

Yeah. So I was happy, I was fortunate enough to be part of that war game and the key takeaway that just made a big impact on me was the fact that what came out of it was small disaggregated units inside the first island chain affected the US’s ability to win in a way that was surprising to me and I think, surprising to the rest, to the war fighters, right? It allowed the US to control timing and tempo in post operations against the enemy. And it took the initiative and placed the initiative back on the US as opposed to on China in that war game.

But what we came to conclude was it’s going to be really hard to do that in contested logistics. As we played out the war game, it became easier to do contested logistics in this small, disaggregated units. We used small things to move small amounts of equipment to keep these CCAs running, refueled and capable of launching with more munitions to get back into the fight at the pace that you both are talking about.

We used organic fuel that was available. What we came up with though was there’s some key design points that need to happen as, so we need to build in the ability of our CCAs to work in austere locations, to work without standard runways. Runway independence, however, you define that was a big deal. No NATO’s, 8,000-foot runways, but being able to launch from all of the islands inside the first island chain, to be able to control the geography of where you wanted to be at. And at the same time, being able to turn the aircraft without using the standard age equipment packages that you would get.

It played out that we ran into overwing versus single point refueling became one of the major critical paths in this whole argument. So building, designing for austere locations by small teams was super, super important.

Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:

I know you didn’t ask, but can I just add one quick thing?

Panel Moderator: Mark Gunzinger:

Absolutely.

Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:

So, this thought of this problem being insurmountable, and I agree with analysis that’s been done. We can actually do this, but it’s got to be specifically designed into the system, and we will do that. We’ll do that. The days of our Air Force operating from sanctuary, they’re over. We are going to be under attack. And so, we’ve got to understand that we’ve got operate while we’re under attack. I mean we did this before, right? It was called ATSO, ability to survive and operate. So, we’ve got to be able to survive and generate combat power. It’s a design point. We’ll design it into the system. We know we have to do this. It’s who we are, it’s our future, it’s who we’ve been, and I know we can get there.

Panel Moderator: Mark Gunzinger:

Outstanding. So, time is flying. I’d like to offer each one of our panelists about 20 sections, if you will, just to wrap up our final comments. Starting, Dave?

Dave Alexander:

Okay. 20 seconds. So anyway, our first combat aircraft is down on the floor. I encourage you to come out and see it. We designed that in two years and that was T-1, if you will, in our production line. So, 80% of that aircraft is common to what we’re calling the second airplane, the combat aircraft, which is the model that you see at the AFRL booth. And so that 80% commonality will make the new design, which is the design for productionization, our P-1 aircraft, if you will. So, we’re up and running and we’re ready to mass produce.

Jason Levin:

First of all, I just want to commend Secretary Kendall, United States Air Force, really leaning in on a fast-moving program and really wanting get capability to the field quickly. At Anduril, we’re all in on this. I mean, everyone at Anduril is completely stoked to be working on CCA. We’ve experienced people working on it. We have new people fresh out of college come to Anduril working on CCA, contributing to America. Everyone, engineers, manufacturing folks, technicians, test and evaluation, they’re all in, working as hard as possible to get CCA into the air and into the fight as soon as we can.

Robert Winkler:

So, in my 20 seconds, I’ll say that the CCA program is built to go fast, but we’re not going fast enough. We need to get aircraft with autonomy in the hands of the war fighter today at the next upcoming red flags so people can get comfortable with it. So, by the time that these aircraft are built and flying, which will take a little bit of time, no matter how fast we want to go, that our units, our war fighters are already used to dealing with these things. So, whether it’s surrogates, whether it’s autonomous F-16 or some other type of aircraft, let’s get that in the hands of the war fighter today and move out because this is going to be a big impact to how we fight wars in the future.

Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:

Can I go back and be a captain again?

Panel Moderator: Mark Gunzinger:

Sure.

Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:

All right. The reason I want to is because I’m so excited about the future. I’m excited about the capabilities we’re developing. I’m excited about the force design we have, and I think about the force that we’ve operated for the last 30 years. I mean, we were set up perfectly with war-winning capabilities, and right now, we’re doing the same thing for future generations of airmen.

The CCA, our partnerships that we have with industry are fantastic. We have a solid understanding of the problem. We know where we need to go. We know what winning the war looks like, our partnerships we have with our allies and other partners in the regions. It’s fantastic. It’s an exciting time and it’s a great to be a part of it.

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