Integrating CCAs into the Operational Force

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This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI. Please report inconsistencies to comms@afa.org.

Heather Penney:

So I’d like to welcome everyone to our panel Integrating CCA into the Operational Force. I’m Heather Penney, Director of Studies and Research at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. So several years ago the Air Force embarked on a radical approach to increasing its lethality and mass. The development of autonomous aircraft intended to collaborate with manned combat aircraft. But what seemed like science fiction is real today. Increment 1 collaborative combat aircraft are actively flying and testing. But being real and ready are two different things, and the Air Force is aggressively developing the MLPFP that go behind a genuinely new capability. Maturing CCA will require robust testing, the develop of new operating concepts and TTPs, and learning how to best field, maintain, and modernize to team seamlessly with crewed platforms, both in peacetime training and in contested environments. To discuss this topic I’m honored to be joined by three Air Force officers who are deeply familiar with this new technology. First I’d like to introduce Brigadier General David Epperson. General Epperson currently serves as a commander of the US Air Force Warfare Center at Nellis Air Force Base. Next to him I’d like to welcome Colonel Timothy Helfrich, the Program Acquisition Executive for Fighters and Advanced Aircraft at the Air Force Lifecycle Management Center, Air Force Materiel Command. And finally I’d like to introduce Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Jensen, commander of the Experimental Operations Unit at Nellis Air Force Base. It’s a pleasure to have all of you here with us today. So Colonel Helfrich, I’d like to start with you. As a Program Acquisition Executive for CCA, would you please bring us up to speed regarding where we currently stand with Increment One?

Col. Timothy Helfrich:

Yeah, you bet. It’s a good question, kind of just set a foundation for what we’ll talk about today. I like to sometimes, as I was prepping for this, I took a step back and wanted to look at how we’ve been going, you know, since the beginning, since day one. And it’s impressive to look at the success story that CCA has been, not just from an acquisition perspective, but the capabilities that we are driving to so quickly. And really you see it as foundational for how the Secretary of War’s acquisition transformation needs to happen. And so it all really started, you can’t forget this, how inextricably tied CCA is to our Air Force Research Laboratory. Honestly, there would be no CCA without the Air Force Research Laboratory. From the Skyborg program, to the work that they did on what is now the YFQ-42, and evolved on the YFQ-44. So we have benefited greatly from what our S&T community has done there. And that’s gotten us to a situation where we could go very quickly. We’re currently on contract with General Atomics and Andral. They are built, they’ve designed, and now they’re building, and as you know, flying. Both flying different aircraft. They’ve got from contract award to first flight in less than 18 months. At the same time, we’re leveraging our software sold separately approach by having two different mission autonomy vendors, which have already built their autonomy. And now we’ve integrated that into the air vehicles. And as you saw in press release, GA flew with the Collins mission autonomy a couple weeks ago, and you’ll hear about this later, but just yesterday Andral flew with the Shield AI mission autonomy. So we now have two different mission autonomies flying on two different aircraft. Quite an accomplishment going so quickly. But we’ve got a lot ahead of us still. As you know, the chief just on Monday talked about the fact that we are smartly taking the initial steps towards getting to weapons delivery. We’ve also done a lot of work with showing that we can actually quarterback the CCA from the appropriate weapon systems, including a demonstration, live flight demonstration recently with the F-22. The full, like the exact equipment that we will field, we were able to show that end-to-end with the surrogate CCA. So the rest of this year we’re also going to look at integrating F-22s with our actual CCA. And at the same time, we’re executing source selections for going into production. And we’ll be making that decision here by the end of the year, both on air vehicles and mission autonomy. So a lot’s happening from integration perspective, as well as moving the ball forward in record time.

Brig. Gen. David C. Epperson:

I just want to add, you know, this is really exciting times. I first got involved with the CCAs when I was at the Pentagon as the director of checkmate. Air Force senior leadership came to us and said, you know, can you help us look at how do we really get this capability in warfighter hands as fast as possible? And at that time there was a lot going on in the S&T world, but we looked at, you know, what does the full court press look like in order to get this capability in those warfighter hands? And so, you know, it’s kind of a little bit of a three-pronged thing that we were thinking about back then. One was how do we get the acquisition piece taken care of and actually get the right hardware and software that can go execute on this. Another one was the experimental operations unit. How do you take a new capability, something that we haven’t had previously in the Air Force, and figure out how you are going to do the tactics, techniques, and procedures to be able to actually employ that when it fields? And because CCA is going so fast, we needed to do these things in a parallel concept and Doubled will be able to share what he’s doing in the experimental operations unit. But the idea is, you know, it’s not just the aviators or the quarterbacks, but it’s the entire thing from the logistics train to the maintenance and kind of revolutionizing the thought process that we use for CCA. And then I think the final piece is, you know, as we move into autonomous platforms, it’s important to have that trust, right? The human trust element. If I’m gonna have a team of combat collaborative aircraft that are teaming and partnering with my manned aircraft, I have to be able to trust that they are gonna do what I’m gonna ask them to do. And so there’s been programs along the way, along with our S&T, with Vista, and, you know, future maybe Venom, to help that with human on the loop opportunities to look at how do we trust that autonomy and make sure that it is going to deliver and that our operators trust it the way that we need them to fully integrate the capability moving forward.

Heather Penney:

So Colonel Jensen, how is the EOU different from how we’ve traditionally been developing? I mean, so we’ve got, you know, conversations from General Epperson about this is new and different because we’ve got to do this in a parallel approach. How is this accelerating CCA?

Lt. Col. Matthew Jensen:

Yeah, it’s a great question. First, I didn’t realize you were involved in the original concept. I’ve been telling everyone that’s Colonel Helfrich’s idea, so good to know I learned something new today. To answer your question, Penney, the, you know, the Experimental Operations Unit, when I showed up almost three years ago, is myself and Shotgun McCauley. Both of us have backgrounds in weapon school instructors, operational test. He’s an F-35 pilot, me an MP9 pilot, so you have a RPA pilot and a fighter pilot, which kind of sounds like the start of a bad joke. And together we started really just questioning, like, what is an EOU? Like, what should we be doing? What problems are we solving? And we were chartered to start with a dot mil PFP, which, if I asked every single one of us up here, we’d have a different answer on what that actually means. And so what we’ve, what we’ve since determined is that the Experimental Operations Unit’s mission right now is to discover how to most effectively employ and integrate collaborative combat capabilities in relevant timelines. And the key word there is “discover.” We have ideas, we have a bunch of concepts, you know, a bunch of whiteboarded events, but we still have to go out and prove it. And so that’s where the, you know, experimentation, the learning portion comes in. And then in relevant timelines, much like Colonel Humphrey just alluded to, typically we look at getting, you know, capability of a warfighter in like a 10-to-15-year timeline, which I think we all agree is kind of ludicrous. And so, we’re looking to do that in two to three years. And so, I think if we’re successful, what that looks like is in, you know, when the first production tails hit the ramp here shortly, we already know how to use them and what combat capabilities they bring to the warfighter.

Heather Penney:

Okay, so you’ve been flying them. You’ve been flying the YFQ-44 and the YFQ-42. So, you’re approving it. Can you go more into the integration and what that testing regimen looks like?

Lt. Col. Matthew Jensen:

Yeah, so that’s probably the key difference in what Experimental Ops brings to this, this program. Typically, when we have a program, it goes through a very linear science and tech, prototyping, developmental tests, operational tests. We’ve done a lot to integrate developmental tests and operational tests over the couple of years, but it’s still very linear. What we’re doing with the experimental operations is we’re bringing warfighters all the way to the left into prototyping, even in some science and tech areas, with the intent that we are informing the program and helping drive requirements and iterating throughout the whole spectrum of development. And so, what we see today is with the vendors doing a heavy vendor-led developmental test in conjunction with the Aerodominance Combined Test Force out at Edwards, we are there side by side with them. So as they’re doing the basics and the necessary work to do flight sciences, we are training and learning how everything works, starting to validate some of the concepts and ideas, and then that’s really going to help us as we shift the weight of effort from developmental tests to experimental operations, where we are learning and iterating ideas rather than worrying about validation and verification of system requirements.

Heather Penney:

No, that’s really, I think that’s really important because moving that integration to the left of integrating the human into that teaming concept is going to be really crucial because we have to build that in from the beginning and do that rapid iteration and development. So, Colonel Helfrich, I’d like to maybe go a little bit back to basics. I mean you mentioned that we’ve got Collins and Shield now operating their mission autonomy. Can you describe how the mission autonomy is different from the flight autonomy for the CCA?

Col. Timothy Helfrich:

Yeah, it’s a good question and we get it quite a bit. And I’m actually gonna let Doubled jump in here too because a lot of it gets into how it’s employed. So, the flight autonomy, think of it as the parts that are highly coupled with your flight and safety critical software, right? So just the basic things that make sure that the aircraft flies and it’s safe and could do the basic functions. The mission autonomy is just as you would expect. It is the thing that brings the mission at the edge. It puts in the TTPs. It’s what the pilot generally brings to the fight at the edge. And so, we were able to, and I’ll just take this segue to talk about one of my favorite topics, which is the government reference architectures, right? And that’s really what’s enabled us to do the acquisition the way we are doing it right now and delivering the capability we’re going to deliver by separating the flight autonomy, which really coupled with flight and safety critical, away from that mission autonomy. We can very quickly iterate on that mission autonomy and even swap it out very quickly when necessary to give the operator what they need and to respond to the feedback that they provide. But Doubled, maybe you want to talk a little bit more about how that mission autonomy will be used.

Lt. Col. Matthew Jensen:

Yeah, thanks for letting me pile on. We see it as essentially the pilot in the seat, right? And so, we’re treating it as that as we work hand-in-hand. So, the EOU personnel are almost daily interacting with the software vendors to provide feedback and help develop a system that actually provides capability. I think we’re probably treating it much like we would a student pilot, where, hey, let’s get through the basics, make sure it can do, you know, can you stay in your airspace, can you fly, can you avoid other aircraft. And then as we build confidence in that, we’ll start to add more and more capability, more and more challenges to it. And the goal is that eventually you have a transferable capability that is as good as your, you know, high-end, highly proficient fighter pilot that’s out there.

Heather Penney:

So, the mission autonomy is one piece because that’s what’s embedded within the CCA, that’s the agent, the combat piece of that. How is that integrating? You’ve just recently flown the Raptor with all of their GUI, all of the interfaces. How does the mission autonomy and that human teaming piece, that software piece, work? Like, how are you doing that?

Lt. Col. Matthew Jensen:

Yeah, yeah. So, our sister squadron, the 422 Test and Evaluation Squadron, so this is our operational test side, integrating with developmental tests to perform these demos, right? And we’re there helping them along the way. And so, you have a human in a manned platform who is interacting via tablet, and that is over, communicating over a data link to the mission autonomy. And there’s a set of feedback that goes back and forth with, you know, “Hey, I sent a command, are you doing what I thought, what I commanded you to do?” And building that trust. And I think we alluded to a little bit, but trust is going to be like that key component as we build out crew and crew teaming. Not just for those controlling the CCA, but anyone else flying around them, right? If you build a strike package with 150 aircraft and you tell them you have autonomous aircraft in a block, everyone needs to trust and understand that that aircraft is going to maintain its block, it’s going to keep safe separation. And in training, we want to make sure that when it RTBs, it doesn’t, you know, fly into somebody else’s block and cause a comm.

Heather Penney:

So, General Epperson, I’d like to bring this back to you because in your position as you develop the test and test the tactics, techniques, and procedures to ensure that our warfighters can maximize lethality of their aircraft systems and weapons, what is your team doing right now to develop that big-picture vision for how we’ll employ CCA?

Brig. Gen. David C. Epperson:

Yeah, and so that’s a great question. The team, actually, the Experimental Operations Unit, has been helping develop what we think that looks like in the mix moving forward. And the way that I would think about it is, you know, right now we are pretty platform-centric in how we think about our capabilities and how we fight. We integrate all those together, but it’s not a true system of systems. When we move forward to combat collaborative aircraft, it really becomes that system of systems where we will probably have multiple different types of combat collaborative aircraft doing different types of mission sets paired with our manned platforms in order to create that mass in order to challenge the adversary and what they’re doing. So we’re looking at everything from, you know, what is the ranges available, what are the capabilities, what’s the, you know, numbers that you would put of CCA versus manned platforms, and really what that mix is, and going through different wargaming iterations to figure out what we think that might look like moving forward. So, as we develop the actual platform and we’re able to pair it with the aircraft, we can go out and test that and make sure that that is actually how we want to employ the aircraft against our adversaries.

Heather Penney:

So Doubled, at the EOU then, have specific CONOPS and TTPs for CCA been developed, and how are you refining those?

Lt. Col. Matthew Jensen:

Yeah, we have some, like I said, a bunch of whiteboard ideas. As we continue to go through and learn what capabilities really each mission autonomy and each platform brings, right, they’re not equal, is that we will leverage their strengths, figure out where our weaknesses are as a force, and try to help, you know, fill those weaknesses. When you look at an autonomous system, it doesn’t need crew rest, it doesn’t have to worry about, you know, time in the sky or how long it’s flying, it doesn’t need food, doesn’t need proficiency training. And so, when you start thinking about where do we lack in providing tempo and pace and ability to provide or project force, I think that’s where CCA makes most of its money.

Col. Timothy Helfrich:

Yeah, I’ll just add, I was talking earlier about what we’re going to be doing this year, and I purposely left out probably the most important thing so we could hit it right now. The most important thing that we’re going to do this year is we’re going to put CCA in the hands of the EOU. You know, we’re going to do that in a matter of just a few short months so that they could really start to iterate on that. They’re going to have the time to figure out how to integrate CCA into the force and do exactly what we need to provide that capability.

Heather Penney:

That’s really exciting. And so building on, Doubled, one of the things you said about how we leverage the advantages of the CCA and the software and the agent nature of that not needing crew rest and so forth, one of the key components that they should, that CCA should provide us, is the ability to rapidly adapt to a changing battle space. So, I’d like to open this question up to all of you, but Colonel Helfrich specifically, you know, no matter how we plan and simulate for combat, things are going to change once we get into conflict for real, whether or not that’s adversary war reserve modes or things like that. So how will the underlying software and algorithms be updated once they’re, you know, once these changes come, how do we update that with the CCA in the field?

Col. Timothy Helfrich:

Yeah, great question, Heather. There’s been, this has kind of been fundamental to how we’ve set things up. First of all, we often, I oftentimes get the question, hey, is the mission autonomy going to be ready day one? And I actually kind of bristle at that question because we have set up a system, a different philosophy. It’s not what you get on day one is all you get. What you get on day one is the first MVP and then you will, we will continue to iterate based on operator feedback. We’ve purpose-built our contracting strategy to make sure that the vendors that we bring on are incentivized monetarily to vigorously take the feedback and incorporate it from the operators. So not only do we have a contractual method to do that and our teaming with industry, but the autonomy GRA has proven out that we’re able to make changes very quickly, even in flight. In fact, yesterday what we did was we took, we flew one mission autonomy flown by Shield AI and then in the same flight without landing, we went and pivoted to a second mission autonomy, same flight. So, we’re demonstrating through the architectures that we can make these changes. We’re setting up the structure of the program to be able to respond and integrate with the operator every single day. And so, what you get on day one, that’s just the first step. You’re gonna keep getting better and better.

Lt. Col. Matthew Jensen:

Yeah, I think our dream of that vision is we go fly, we say I don’t like the way it did that, come back, debrief it, send the fix to the vendor, next morning we show up, provide a new load and then it flies the way we want it and the fix is there. That might be a little ways off but I think that’s achievable.

Brig. Gen. David C. Epperson:

I think the other key is with the government reference architecture, as you were talking about the GUI, because it’s all the same, you know, we can talk about, we make updates to certain platforms and they should, you know, there should be no problem in an F-22 or whatever other quarterback we’re using to be able to integrate with that platform immediately and use that new capability.

Heather Penney:

So, with the software sold separately in the GRA and this mission autonomy, Colonel Helfrich, how is acquisition transformation supporting your initiatives to rapidly deliver and go through these iterations?

Col. Timothy Helfrich:

Yeah, I mean, a few things on there. One is, I think that a lot of the things that the Secretary of War talked about in his acquisition transformation are things that we are already doing today. I love the acquisition transformation and the fact that it is reinforcing what we’re already doing and giving us the top cover to keep doing it and to spread it to more programs. One of the key ones in the strategy is how do you keep multiple vendors as far as possible and we’ve been doing that on CCA. It gives us the reinforcement that that’s the right approach. We’ve seen it in success, but it’s also good to see that it’s being seen at the highest levels and so that’ll allow us to continue to take multiple vendors as long as possible, you know, potentially even into large-scale production.

Heather Penney:

So, you know, General Epperson, I’d like to dig a little bit further what you mentioned regarding the GUI being the same because of the government reference architecture, but as we adapt the autonomy based off of real battle space conditions and then inject that into the CCA, the humans will need to adapt as well. Are we leaning into that and what ideations do you have regarding how we would then train the humans to adapt to the advances that we provide to the autonomy?

Brig. Gen. David C. Epperson:

I think that’s part of what we’re looking at with the EOU and the combination between that and the operational test side with the 422 to understand what it is that we need to provide the aviators to be able to adapt to it as we move forward. We’re not there yet, you know, this is we’re learning as we move forward, but I think that’s the crux of having the EOU and getting platforms actually in their hands so that we can start to get sets and reps and what we’re going to see over time as these performers change their mission autonomy as we advance the program, I mean, it’s going to change quite a bit between now and fielding and so we’re going to understand better how those changes matter to, you know, both the CCA but also to the quarterback and how we train up that aircrew as we move forward and so that’s part and parcel the TTPs that Doubled and his team will write and create as we do the fielding.

Lt. Col. Matthew Jensen:

Yeah, to pile onto that, I think we’re gonna start with and what we’re seeing so far is that the cognitive burden to manage other assets, you know, that are part of your formation that you’re also trying to manage is quite high but as the autonomy advances, much like automation the rest of our lives, as that advances that cognitive burden will reduce and it will really really be much easier and so we are working with 42, we’ve got the weapon school at Nellis that we’re leveraging and so we have some of the top tacticians in the Air Force all working together to figure out the best way to integrate, you know, the pilot vehicle interface into the system.

Col. Timothy Helfrich:

Yeah, so this actually brings up a kind of an interesting story, something we’ve seen as we’re developing that GUI. At first, when we first brought pilots in, they wanted every bit of information and they wanted to control every, every minute thing that the CCA was doing and as they got more comfortable, they’re like, “No, I don’t need to see that. I don’t need to see that.” And especially when they started doing tasks that were more high gain, they’re like, “Okay, I’m gonna, I’ve seen it do it, you know, hundreds of times in the virtual environment. I trust that it’s gonna do what I need to, so I need to see less and I’m gonna give it very, if you will, like plays.” And so that’s exactly what we expected was gonna happen, but it was great to see it in real life.

Lt. Col. Matthew Jensen:

Yeah, the funny thing about this is like we were asked recently if we needed a like guidebook and a training syllabus for using the tablets and interface and our response is, “Do you have a, you know, manual for your smartphone?” “No.” “Well, it should be that easy.” Like that’s what we’re driving towards.

Heather Penney:

“What does this button do?” No, but you know, Colonel Helfrich, it’s really good to hear that you’ve been able to develop the trust in that virtual environment but flying in the real world is sometimes very different because the physical world, the physics-based, is sometimes very different from how we model that. As we know, all models are wrong, some are just more useful than others. Have we been able to see that the behaviors we’ve anticipated of the CCA actually play out in the real world so that trust is transferable?

Col. Timothy Helfrich:

Yeah, we have a few examples that we’ve already seen. One is when we went and flew the mission autonomy with both, whether it’s the Collins or the Shield AI, they performed as expected and they performed as in the virtual environment. We’re obviously learning like, “Hey, how do you take into effect some some winds and shear and things like that?” But we saw what we expected to happen and when you continue to do that over and over, it builds trust. We also saw when we did the F-22 in-flight demonstration that in flight, the GUI worked as it did in ground testing and as it did in the virtual environment. And so, continuing to do what you say you’re going to do and have the autonomy meet its commitments, I think will help build that trust. But I probably would ask the two guys with flight suits on their thoughts on how they get to trust.

Lt. Col. Matthew Jensen:

No, that’s just it. It does what you expected to do, and you see that over and over again.

Brig. Gen. David C. Epperson:

Yeah, it’s the sets and reps, right? You don’t build that trust in a single event. You build that trust over time and that’s, I think, the critical nature of what we’re doing here so that we build that trust in the platforms by the time that we are ready to field them. Instead of, you know, if we were doing the sequential, we’d be fielding and then we’d be trying to develop the trust afterwards. And I think this gives us that opportunity to start to develop that baseline of trust and push that out to our force.

Heather Penney:

So, what — I’m sorry, go ahead.

Lt. Col. Matthew Jensen:

Just gonna add on that, I think to get after that, specifically we’re gonna start integrating into large force exercises as soon as we can, which will probably surprise some people when they show up to Red Flag and they’re like, “Why are the robots flying with us?” But, you know, we’ll drive it and see what happens.

Heather Penney:

No, that’s very exciting because that then implies that you’re beginning to mature into how that fielding concept may work. So, are there early ideas coming from the EOU and your experiences regarding how you’ll actually field these CCA? Whether or not that’s an individual unit that then just deploys and you meet up at the Marshall Point or are you taking off from the same locations? How are you stepping into what those future fielding doctrine might be?

Lt. Col. Matthew Jensen:

Yeah, I’ll give the typical weapons officer answer, it depends. I mentioned dot mil PFP before, right? And so, when we start looking at the organization, the training requirements, the personnel facilities that are really the initial focus of what we’re doing, we’re looking at the force structure that’s required in order to just, you know, have a unit that can get these aircraft into the fight. And so, I think we’ve officially labeled them autonomous fighter squadrons. We are working through what types of people are comprised in those units, right? And so, we are moving away from the traditional like AFSC specific type to start until we figure out more and are able to understand like, do we need, can we use the type of people that exist already? Do we have to train, you know, a whole new AFSC? And so that’s all in works right now as we work through the challenging problems.

Col. Timothy Helfrich:

Yeah, I’ll just pile onto that, Doubled. The one thing that we do know is they will not have to take off and land from the same places that our manned aircraft are. We will have max flexibility to employ these weapons systems however the combatant commander needs.

Brig. Gen. David C. Epperson:

I think that’s the key, flexibility. That’s exactly what was coming to my mind. The idea behind these is to give us the flexibility to base them in the optimum place based on the capability that they provide and where and when we want them to team with our manned platforms.

Heather Penney:

So that then begs the question of the integration for that mission. How do we get the human teammates and the CCA on the same page when it comes to briefing that mission, developing their TTPs, and then also the debriefing element because that’ll be crucial towards those combat updates for the CCA.

Lt. Col. Matthew Jensen:

Yeah, we see mission planning and debrief as just as critical as like the mission execution part of it all. If we’re not able to get the mission plan, get a, you know, requirement set and constraint set for how we want CCA to be integrated in the force when they meet up at the Marshall or wherever at and their use, then we fail. We fail and it’s not not gonna work but it’s got to be full spectrum from start to finish. And so, as we refine what mission planning is gonna look like and how that gets into execution, we’ve already got concepts for debrief on how we’re gonna iterate and debrief. And so right now when we do like mission autonomy demos, we’ve got software engineers looking at code and looking at results and it didn’t take too long for us to go, “No, that’s not gonna fly in like a pilot debrief, right? Like that we can’t have the dude in the corner like searching through the code.” So, we’ve already started working with MIT Lincoln’s labs and a couple other units and organizations to build out how do we debrief autonomy when it lands. And really, I want to be able to like talk to a large language model and it explain what the autonomy did at a certain time in certain place and provide the reasonings why it did it.

Brig. Gen. David C. Epperson:

So, I think there’s gonna be some specifics as Doubled talked about that are different for the CCA itself and the vehicle and making sure that we’re making the changes to the mission autonomy the way we want to. But at the same time like the distributed ops nature, I don’t think is any different than what we’re doing with manned platforms today. You think about most of the AORs that you know it’s not that you’re gonna have all of your assets at one airfield. Necessarily we’re gonna have them distributed across the AOR and they’re most likely gonna meet up you know airborne and go execute that mission. And so, the same way that we are passing the information to those different flights at different bases is the same way that I would imagine us passing the information to the manned aircraft flight as well as to the CCAs. And then they’re gonna rendezvous at some place and execute the mission. And so, I think what we are paving right now with distributed ops in the Air Force with our manned platforms is right in line with that. We’ll just have to figure out the intricacies of the CCA.

Heather Penney:

And this could potentially lead to exciting new doctrine or ways of employing CCA because like the RPA, the way RPAs operate you could have a handoff from one manned teammate to another manned teammate of the same CCA or CCA flight.

Lt. Col. Matthew Jensen:

I think that’s where the collaboration comes into the definition of CCA right? Like you will not have a single operator on the loop or in the loop managing the asset. It will go through various touch points throughout its, you know, day in a life where you have potentially dozens of different people interacting with the system.

Heather Penney:

So, I’d like to go back to the debrief because Doubled had mentioned potentially using large language models to learn why the CCA behaved or did what they did. So, this leads to some notion of transparency regarding what the mission autonomy is doing and why it’s doing that. What can humans learn from that?

Lt. Col. Matthew Jensen:

Well I think when we look at sitting in a debrief with you know aircrew and we were able to look at our wingman in the eye and go hey at this time you did this thing why and then you just keep asking why and why and you dig down and get the root cause of you know the actual either perception decision or execution error that occurred. And so, we want to be able to do that with CCA as well and so trying to understand how we do that with autonomy is kind of the hard problem to solve on that.

Col. Timothy Helfrich:

Yeah the way we’ve started looking at this is we have a basically a mission autonomy lab that we call game and it essentially is like an orange wired version of the JSE and so we’re learning is what you know what commands can we pull off and what logic is being used that we can pull off to be able to provide that for the debrief. And one of the things to note is my job is to you know one job it’s to field capability that that weapon system that is the CCA is not just an aircraft it’s not even just the mission autonomy it’s the debrief capability that allows the operator to do the full lifecycle so that and as well as the different play have making sure that all the different places where quarterbacks may exist have the ability to communicate with the CCA so we’re working hand-in-hand with Doubled to figure out exactly what we need to deliver from a materiel solution that allows him to do his job.

Heather Penney:

That’s really cool and I think one of the things that’s very interesting about that coupled with the notion of being able to have the transparency to debrief for the CCA is not only the ability to update the autonomy to make sure that’s doing what we want to but are things that we might learn from the battle space that might change the way that we do human tactics as well. How might we sort of learn from that adapt our human tactics to do something novel and innovative and surprising in the battle space but be able to get that to the humans and train them to that.

Brig. Gen. David C. Epperson:

Yeah, I think it starts with we need to think about CCA’s in a different light. I think when people initially thought of CCA’s they thought of them as hey that’s my new welded wingman and we’re gonna fly a normal fighter formation just like we did but there will only be one manned aircraft, and you know maybe the other three will be the CCA’s. I think to Doubled’s point about the collaborative nature of this I think that it’s going to be a much more fluid environment out there and we have to be careful as the EOU and operational test is as all these entities start to experiment with it we need to not fall into those trappings of well this is how we’ve always operated with you know fighter aircraft and this is just another fighter aircraft and I think that once we do that and we look at it from kind of a clean sheet perspective with the tactics that will automatically start to feed back in. When we start to fly them in large force exercise and we see how that we use them and we see how they you know maybe go be back and forth between quarterbacks or whatever happens I think that it’s coming back and doing that critical debrief on the human side just as much as on that side to figure out where we can take lessons learned and really adapt how we do tactics today.

Heather Penney:

So, Colonel Helfrich, as the Air Force moves towards fielding CCA what are some of the key milestones and touch points that you’re looking for as we go forward?

Col. Timothy Helfrich:

Yeah, we think a lot about this and making sure that we set up what our next our next learning point is and what decisions we need to make. So the big things that are on the road I mentioned we’re gonna be doing lots of demonstrations and testing whether it’s with weapons with quarterbacks coming up this year but one of the big events will be what we what in acquisition community is typically they call it like a milestone B or milestone B/C but it’s really going to be making that decision to go into what we call EMD light or engineering manufacturing development light and production. It’s really picking the vendors that we are going to go with for the increment one program. That’ll happen this this year and then we will get moving pretty darn quickly into production.

Heather Penney:

Thank you, this is really exciting. We haven’t even touched on increment two but we’ve come to the end of our time so lightning round any final thoughts you’d like to leave with the audience? Doubled we’ll start with you.

Lt. Col. Matthew Jensen:

Yeah I’ll just say that as we bring warfighters left into this entire experiment and of its in and of its own that we are really bringing force integration left and that’s a key component to the success of this idea and so the philosophy that the EOU is operating under which is kind of the foundation of our culture is that everyone in the unit is a warfighter and we are dedicated and loyal to making sure we get capabilities to the warfighter at the end of the day and so hopefully what that lends to is you know our man platforms our brothers and sisters in arms on frontline whether they’re on the ground or in the air that they’re able to be more lethal and more survivable or to put simply that they’re able to kill more and die less.

Col. Timothy Helfrich:

Yeah from an acquisition perspective this is truly acquisition transformation in action. We are every single commitment that we have made as a team we have met or beat and generally we’ve beaten them. We are doing that because we have a strong partnership between the operational requirements acquisition and industry and by the way our S&T teammates are huge so working together continuously really setting the foundation for building that arsenal freedom that the Secretary of War talked about and we’ve got a lot to do and there’s a lot of room in the boat so anybody who wants to pick up an oar and get in that boat and row with us please let me know because we need all the rowers we can.

Brig. Gen. David C. Epperson:

Yeah these are these are exciting times and it is great to see the partnership between the acquisitions between the companies and the performers the teamwork that is going on to the EOU and the operational test team. I mean it is amazing the integration and the dialogue that’s happening back and forth and I think that’s critical in nature to really be able to put this in the in the combat aviators hands as soon as we possibly can and so it’s exciting to be there and be a part of it from the Warfare Center perspective where we’re trying to you know basically bridge from an industry’s innovation into warfighter reality and I think what you’re seeing up here is these guys are making it happen in you know the quickest time we’ve seen to date.

Heather Penney:

Gentlemen thank you so much. It’s clear from the EOU that this is not the end of human warfare but really CCA will allow our manned aircraft or manned combat aircraft to leverage the unique attributes of human cognition to be even more lethal and even more effective within about within the battle space. Thank you all so and so much for joining us today please be sure to visit the Mitchell Institute booth just to the left of the Aurora and have a great air and space power kind of day. Thank you.