“Right now, [AI adoption] is a mixed bag. I think it’s not for lack of effort, but I think there are some institutional pieces there,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin said Monday at the AI+ Expo hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project. “We are understanding the value of it, but assimilating it into our institution is one I think we still have some work to do on.”

There are a number of ongoing efforts to harness AI and autonomous capabilities across the department, including development of loyal wingman drones known as Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), integrating AI into its pilot test schools and experimentation with large language models for administrative support. Allvin also highlighted budding partnerships the service has with academic institutions — such as the DAF-MIT AI Accelerator and Stanford AI Studio — as beneficial to the service’s overall adoption of the tech.

But much like the rest of the Pentagon, the Air Force is encumbered by legacy bureaucratic processes that are unable to keep up with rapid advancements in AI capabilities. As a result, officials are working to find existing technologies, understand the best ways to leverage them and prove their value for the Air Force in order to move forward, Allvin said.

“Sometimes it’s hard for the institution to adapt, so we need to grab onto something and, even though there might be something better coming along in the future, we need to have the institution go, ‘Wow, that’s pretty important, that helps me make decisions better, that helps me do predictive maintenance better,’” he said. “And then, that helps us to really assimilate and be able to jump on the train.”

Allvin noted that one key initiative doing a lot of that legwork is the service’s CCA program, which has been divided into three separate parts. General Atomics and Anduril are currently developing their respective platforms, at least one of which will be chosen as the first CCA drone under Increment 1. At the same time, the Air Force’s Project Venom is testing much of the autonomous flight technology for air-to-air combat that will likely be used by the next-generation drones. Meanwhile, the service’s experimental operations unit at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada is exploring operational concepts for the CCA platforms.

“We have to keep our imaginations wide open to understand this is a game-changing technology that can really shift [and] go to the next level when it comes to air dominance, but we can only do that if we don’t sort of get trapped by the vestiges of the past,” Allvin said.

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The tests represent a critical milestone for the CCA program, which is part of the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) family of systems. The drones are expected to fly alongside the service’s manned platforms — including the sixth-gen F-47 fighter jet — to conduct a range of missions and augment the organization’s aircraft fleet. The ground tests bring the two vendors one step closer to conducting first flights of their drones, scheduled for sometime this summer.

“This phase bridges the gap between design and flight, reducing integration risks, boosting confidence, and laying the groundwork for a successful first flight and eventual fielding to the warfighter,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin said in a statement.

The upcoming ground test phase will include “rigorous evaluations” of both vendors’ prototypes, according to an Air Force statement. The tests will focus on the platforms’ propulsion, avionics, autonomy integration and ground control segments to “validate performance, inform future design decisions, and prepare the systems for flight testing later this year.”

After receiving contracts in 2024 for Increment 1 of the CCA program, General Atomics and Anduril completed critical design reviews of their prototypes last fall. The Air Force in March designated the platforms as the first-ever unmanned fighter aircraft, with General Atomics’ prototype dubbed the YFQ-42A and Anduril’s Fury platform now referred to as the YFQ-44A.

“The CCA program represents a groundbreaking new era in combat aviation, and we remain on schedule to test and fly YFQ-42 in the coming months,” General Atomics President David Alexander said in a statement. “Our work on YFQ-42 will further expand the field of unmanned aviation, and we remain excited for the future.”

Air Force leadership have touted the service’s rapid and flexible approach taken with the CCA program, as it plans to field systems in increments. A competitive production decision for Increment 1 is expected in fiscal 2026, with the first batch of drones planned for fielding sometime before 2030.

“Together, Anduril and the United States Air Force are pioneering a new generation of semi-autonomous fighter aircraft that will fundamentally transform air combat,” Jason Levin, Anduril’s senior vice president of air dominance and strike, said in a statement. “By delivering YFQ-44A at unprecedented speed, we are ensuring that warfighters have ample opportunity to experiment and build the trust required to support operational fielding of CCAs before the end of the decade.”

While General Atomics and Anduril are developing Increment 1 CCA platforms, the Air Force is separately working with five unnamed vendors that are developing the autonomy software for the first batch of drones.

Meanwhile, the service intends to begin development of the next batch of CCA drones, known as Increment 2, during fiscal 2026 to expand mission applications and integrate emerging technologies.

In recent months, Joseph Kunkel, director of force design, integration and wargaming at the Air Force Futures organization, has suggested that future CCA increments could feature a range of options in terms of cost and capabilities — including some attributes that aren’t considered “exquisite” in order to keep price tags low.

Along with initiating ground tests, the Air Force announced Thursday that the CCA drones will be based at California’s Beale Air Force Base, which has been designated as the CCA Aircraft Readiness Unit (ARU).

“The mission of the ARU is to provide combat aircraft ready to deploy worldwide at a moment’s notice. CCA are semi-autonomous in nature so the ARU will not have to fly a significant number of daily sorties to maintain readiness,” the service said in a statement. “The aircraft will be maintained in a fly-ready status and flown minimally so the number of airmen required to support the fleet will be substantially lower than other weapons systems.”

Updated on May 1, 2025, at 3:40 PM: This story has been updated to

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Increment 1 CCA drones under development by General Atomics and Anduril will be referred to as YFQ-42A and YFQ-44A, respectively. While the “Y” refers to the platforms’ status as prototype vehicles and will be dropped once they move into production, the “FQ” designates the CCA drones as unmanned autonomous fighter aircraft — the first platform to be assigned such a designation, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin said.

“For the first time in our history, we have a fighter designation in the YFQ-42 Alpha and the YFQ-44 Alpha,” Allvin said Monday during a keynote speech at the annual AFA Warfare Symposium. “Maybe [it’s] just symbolic, but it’s telling the world that we are leaning into a new chapter of aerial warfare.”

The CCA drones are part of the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) family of systems and are expected to be able to conduct multiple types of missions, from offensive strike to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. The Air Force wants to field the CCA systems in increments, and is planning to field Increment 1 before the end of the decade.

General Atomics and Anduril each received contracts in 2024 for Increment 1 of the program — an effort intended to develop uncrewed platforms able to fly alongside the Air Force’s fifth- and sixth-generation manned aircraft to augment the service’s capabilities. After completing critical design review in November, both vendors are in the process of building their respective prototypes and preparing for first flight tests this year.

“We have two prototypes of Collaborative Combat Aircraft that were on paper less than a couple years ago,” Allvin said. “They’re going to be ready to fly this summer.”

In a statement, Anduril Senior Vice President of Engineering Jason Levin echoed Allvin’s position that the CCA designations underscored a new era of unmanned military aircraft. The company is currently in the fabrication and testing process for its Increment 1 prototype — dubbed Fury — ahead of first flight this year.

“The designation is evidence of the program’s progress, and we continue to work tirelessly to deliver a capability that will expand the United States’ ability to project combat airpower,” Levin said in a statement.

At the same time, General Atomics is proposing a variant from its Gambit family of drones for CCA Increment 1. Much of the company’s previous work with the Air Force Research Laboratory to build an X-plane known as the XQ-67A Off-Board Sensing Station has been carried over to develop its CCA prototype. 

“These aircraft represent an unrivaled history of capable, dependable uncrewed platforms that meet the needs of America’s warfighters and point the way to a significant new era for airpower,” GA-ASI President David Alexander said in a statement. 

While the Air Force remains confident in the CCA program’s progress, the fate of the service’s manned sixth-generation fighter remains in limbo. After pausing the selection process for the NGAD platform last year, then-Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall announced in December that the service would defer any final decisions on the program’s fate to the Trump administration.

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In a congressionally-mandated report submitted to lawmakers in December and set to be published Monday, Kendall outlined his prediction on what security environments and technological advancements will contribute to what both the Air and Space Forces will look like in the year 2050. The document covers a broad range of emerging capabilities that will shape future warfare, many of which are underpinned by an expanded use of AI and autonomy.

“It is likely these areas of advanced military technology will be manifest through the increasingly widespread use of autonomy and automation, in all domains, but especially in space, in cyberspace, and in the air,” Kendall wrote in the report, titled “The Department of the Air Force in 2050.”

The assessment comes at a critical inflection point for AI and autonomy, especially their use by the Defense Department as it looks to counter emerging threats from adversaries such as China and Russia. During Kendall’s tenure at the helm of the DAF, both the Air and Space Forces have made strides in leveraging the technologies — from using artificial intelligence to assist personnel in day-to-day tasks to the development of the Air Force’s robotic wingmen known as Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA).

As the technology proliferates in the coming decades, Kendall believes the department’s greatest challenge will be understanding what the right mix of manned and unmanned capabilities will be for specific warfighting functions.

“The hardest thing, I think, for us to come to grips with is going to be the human-machine interface and how the decision making takes place,” Kendall said Monday during an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We’re going to have to figure out how to manage this in a way which is cost effective, which is consistent with our values [and] which is militarily competitive. I think that’s going to be a tough problem to solve.”

Kendall predicted in the report that AI-assisted decision making and support tools will be at the center of many military functions and capabilities by 2050. In particular, he highlighted that AI will likely inform battle management platforms to quickly inform mission planning and also help extract relevant target identification and tracking information from multi-sensor databases.

“Victory or defeat in the air or in space at the human scale is likely to be determined by which combatant has fielded the most advanced AI technology in the areas most crucial to achieving victory,” Kendall wrote.

At the same time, autonomous systems will likely become even more common in warfare by 2050 than they are today in Ukraine and the Middle East, Kendall noted. While space systems have always carried a significant degree of autonomous capability, aerial platforms and weapons are also expected to operate with less human intervention.

The Air Force is on a path to introduce more intelligent autonomous systems into the force with its planned fleet of CCA drones, expected to fly alongside the service’s manned fighter jets to conduct various missions. Contractors General Atomics and Anduril are gearing up for first flights of their respective Increment 1 CCA prototypes in 2025, and the Air Force is already in planning stages for the follow-on Increment 2.

Kendall said at CSIS that he expects the Air Force to use a mix of manned and unmanned platforms “for a long time” — pushing back on recent comments made from tech titan and top Trump advisor Elon Musk that urged the U.S. military to stop buying manned aircraft. 

“We’ve got to think through the command and control, and I think for the foreseeable future crewed fighters are going to be managing the formation that includes CCAs,” Kendall said.

Introduction of more autonomy and artificial intelligence will also require a significant culture change within the Department of the Air Force, which is another battle all in itself, Kendall noted.

“The culture and the history and the legacy of the Air Force, which I have been steeped in — particularly for the last few years, but also for my whole life — really is about the role of the pilot,” he said. “Letting go, to some degree of that, I think is an incredibly difficult, emotional thing for people to do.”

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There are at least 12 AI agents currently being tested at Edwards Air Force Base, Brig. Gen. Doug Wickert, commander of the 412th Test Wing, said during a Dec. 5 briefing with reporters. The autonomous pilots were developed by a range of companies as part of the ongoing Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program, as well as other complementary efforts.

The autonomous agents won’t directly be used in the Air Force’s future programs, but instead are being leveraged to understand how the service will test and train AI in the future, Wickert said. The current testing will feed into how the service will put through trials the first batch of Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), which are expected to arrive at the base after General Atomics and Anduril conduct first flights of their prototypes in 2025, he added.

In order to increase trust in artificial intelligence, integrating the technology onto CCA drones will be an “iterative process” featuring “varying levels of autonomy,” he said.

Edwards has been at the forefront of the Air Force’s efforts to develop and experiment with new technologies, including autonomous flight. The base is also the home of the X-62A VISTA (Variable In-flight Simulator Test Aircraft) platform, a modified F-16 Fighting Falcon operated by the Air Force’s Test Pilot School and used for both student curriculum and autonomous flight research.

While capabilities enabled by AI have shown promise for future warfare, Wickert said there’s still much to be learned. There are currently “gaps” in the Air Force’s ability to test in digital environments and the real world, and AI can sometimes do “unexpected things” during live experiments, he noted.

Wickert also pushed back on recent comments from billionaire and tech titan Elon Musk that claim manned aircraft are both antiquated and overpriced in comparison to drones and other lower-cost platforms. An influential advisor to President-elect Donald Trump, Musk has been tapped alongside Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the proposed “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) aimed at restructuring the federal government and reducing wasteful spending.

“There may be someday we can completely rely on robotized warfare,” Wickert said, but projected that would likely be “centuries away” due to the growing complexity of modern combat and a slew of ethical considerations that come with using AI for military operations.

Artificial intelligence is optimal for the military’s current data fusion and situational awareness missions, according to Wickert. Moving forward, the Pentagon will need to have more trust in autonomy that will allow officials to turn towards AI-enabled solutions in the future, he said.

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“We’ve just finished up, basically, critical design review for both Anduril and General Atomics. Both industry teammates are on the path to get to first flight in a timeline that allows us to get operational capability by the end of the decade,” Col. Timothy Helfrich, senior materiel leader for Air Force Materiel Command’s Advanced Aircraft Division, said during a panel at the Mitchell Institute’s Airpower Futures Forum. 

General Atomics and Anduril each received contracts from the Air Force in April for the development-for-production phase of CCA Increment 1, beating out defense giants Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Boeing for the award. Under the effort’s current phase, the two firms are creating detailed designs, manufacturing drones and conducting flight tests for the CCA Increment 1 airframe.

As part of the Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) family of systems, the CCA drones are intended to fly alongside the service’s manned platforms to augment its aircraft fleet for the service’s air dominance mission. The drones will carry equipment for a range of missions — including offensive strike and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

Now that Anduril and General Atomics have completed CDR — verifying their CCA airframe design maturity for potential development and production phases — both companies are gearing up to conduct first flight tests slated for 2025.

“I would say that we have matured the design to a critical point where we feel confident that it’s moving forward,” Diem Salmon, vice president for air dominance and strike at Anduril, told a small group of reporters after the panel. “Fabrication is moving very quickly, and it’s getting to the path where we’re going to be able to integrate and support the first flight that is, more or less, around the corner.”

As Anduril prepares to fly its offering for CCA Increment 1 — dubbed Fury — the defense startup is in the process of building the test article and testing sub-components before integration onto the airframe, Salmon said. 

General Atomics is also on track to fly a variant of the Gambit family of drones it is proposing for CCA Increment 1 by mid-2025, and it’s taking cues from its successful flight demonstration of the XQ-67A Off-Board Sensing Station in February, a company spokesperson told DefenseScoop in a statement.

Mike Shortsleeve, vice president of strategy business development for General Atomics, said during the panel that the company is leveraging its decades of experience in designing and building unmanned aircraft as it prepares for the first flight.

“When we did the XQ-67A, that effort to build that x-plane — with about 70 to 80 percent carried over into what would be CCA — that helped us to understand not only how that design needs to work, but also how do you actually build it right,” Shortsleeve said.

The Air Force expects to make a competitive production decision for the CCA Increment 1 in fiscal 2026 and plans to field the first batch of systems before the end of the decade.

Helfrich added that the service is on the cusp of kicking off development for the next group of CCA drones known as Increment 2. The Air Force is currently conducting analysis “to make sure we understand what are the right mission use cases for Increment 2 and the top-level attributes. This fiscal year, we will kick off concept refinement, where we then bring in industry to help us further refine what those attributes are and whittle down those use-cases,” he said.

Each iteration of CCAs is expected to feature different capabilities based on the latest technology industry can offer the Air Force at the time. Once fielded, the service will determine which mix of increments will fly for certain missions based on the capabilities they’re carrying to meet specific force designs, Helfrich said.

“No one should think that Increment 2 means ‘Increment 1 plus.’ … That doesn’t mean that Increment 2 has more capability,” he said. “We’re still looking to figure out whether the right balance — if you’re doing the analysis — is to further bring down the capability to maximize a low cost, or is it that I need to change what the focus is from a missile truck to something else.”

In the meantime, the Air Force is also establishing an experimental operations unit that will focus on doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership, personnel, facilities, and policy concepts related to the CCA drones. During an event hosted by Defense One on Wednesday, Air Force acquisition head said he recently approved additional CCA purchases to equip the unit and enable experimentation with real drones.

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The contractor is partnering with the service and the two vendors competing in the ongoing development-for-production phase of CCA Increment 1 to incorporate the weapons onto the drones, Jon Norman, Raytheon’s vice president of air and space defense systems requirements and capability, said during a meeting with reporters Tuesday. News about plans to equip the uncrewed systems with the missile was first reported by Air and Space Forces Magazine in July.

“We’ve been working with the Air Force with their collaborative combat aircraft, and they’re integrating that onto the [Increment 1]. They’re still in the early requirements phase for CCA [Increment 2],” Norman said. 

Part of the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) family of systems, CCA drones are intended to fly alongside the service’s fifth- and sixth-generation manned aircraft in the future. The department intends to rapidly produce the uncrewed platforms to begin testing them in operations before the end of the decade.

The Air Force is planning to design and field the systems in increments in order to gradually iterate and improve their capabilities. Service leaders have said the unmanned aircraft will carry a range of equipment in order to accomplish multiple missions — from intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) to offensive strike.

Norman said the Air Force has set the AIM-120 as “a threshold weapon” for the drones.

“Now you can have a controlling aircraft — whether that’s an [F-35 Lightning II] or an [F-22 Raptor] — that can use those collaborative combat aircraft as a force extender, so they have more munitions available,” he said. “With the collaborative combat aircraft, now it has a platform out there that’s in the right position, survivable, and it can employ AMRAAMs guided and directed by the F-35 or by the F-22.”

In April, Anduril and General Atomics were awarded contracts to create detailed designs, manufacture and conduct flight tests for the first batch of CCAs, known as Increment 1. Once the service nails down its preferred design, the two companies — as well as any other vendors interested — will be able to compete for the final production contract expected to be made in 2026.

The service will display full-scale models of both company’s prototypes during AFA’s Air, Space and Cyber conference in September, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said Tuesday during the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Aerospace Summit.

Raytheon has spent significant time redesigning the missile to add improvements in range, navigation and anti-jamming technology. Although the company did not share which specific variant of the AMRAAM is being integrated onto the CCAs, the range of the newest variant — the AIM-120D — is estimated to be around 100 miles.

Norman said the contractor is currently preparing for a round of tests under the Air Force’s Weapon System Evaluation program to further demonstrate the AMRAAMs range for extended shots. The company didn’t alter anything with the missile’s propulsion system, but changed how it flies for long-range shots so that it has more kinetic energy when it hits targets, he explained.

“What that does is it brings us back into parity, and we actually exceed a lot of the capability of all the pacing threats worldwide. So, it makes AMRAAM kind of future-proof,” Norman said.

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Part of the service’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) family of systems, the CCA drones are intended to fly alongside the Air Force’s fifth- and sixth-generation platforms and augment its manned aircraft fleet. The goal is to develop a system that is a fraction of the cost of crewed platforms and can be quickly built in large quantities on flexible timelines.

The service awarded Anduril and General Atomics contracts in April to develop the air vehicles for the first operational systems known as Increment 1, and it’s concurrently developing requirements for the follow-on Increment 2 platforms. Meanwhile, the Air Force is also working with five vendors on a separate contract to develop the mission autonomy for CCAs.

And while the program is moving forward, a report published by CSIS on Tuesday highlighted that the service’s existing acquisition culture could still turn the CCA drones into platforms that are too expensive and exquisite to produce, potentially inhibiting the Air Force’s ability to field the systems in a meaningful number before the end of the decade.

“Over the next few years, Air Force program managers will encounter lots of tempting opportunities — and perhaps even pressure from Congress — to make the CCA design slightly better performing for (supposedly) slightly more money and a slightly slower schedule,” noted the report — titled “The Defense Department’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft Program: Good News, Bad News, and Unanswered Questions.”

Greg Allen, director of CSIS’s Wadhwani Center for AI and Advanced Technologies and co-author of the report, said that although uncrewed aircraft can have a lower price tag than manned aircraft — due to them carrying less equipment — adding exquisite sensors and having low production capacities may crank up the price of some drones — such as the RQ-4 Global Hawk, which can cost $130 million or more per unit.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has previously estimated the unit cost for CCAs will be around $25-30 million, with the intent to field at least 1,000 platforms. While that is about one-third of the cost of an F-35 Lightning II fighter jet, it is also near the price point for F-16 Falcons currently sold to U.S. allies and partners, according to the report.

“What U.S. strategy needs are assets that it can comfortably put at risk for the mission. And exquisite, expensive stuff is really difficult to risk,” Allen told DefenseScoop ahead of the report’s publication. “So the question here is, are we really thinking about the optimal design space in terms of the tradeoff between cost and performance?”

CCAs are expected to have a modular design that allows them to perform a range of functions, including offensive strike, electronic warfare and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR). Even though those mission sets will require additional equipment, Air Force leadership have publicly asserted they are trying to prevent unnecessary cost growth stemming from additional requirements.

“The Air Force already has expensive, high-performing fighter aircraft like the F-35. The point of the CCA is to be cheap, rapidly built, and numerous,” the CSIS report stated. “This is not to say that the Air Force should tolerate lousy work on the part of its industry partners but merely that cost and schedule must always be kept firmly in focus.”

At the same time, Allen noted that current conversations around the price tag for CCA and other programs focus on sacrificing capability to produce cheaper platforms. The report highlights that cost models commonly used by the Air Force and other government organizations often don’t account for alternative pathways or innovative production methods that can improve cost efficiency without jeopardizing performance and schedule.

For example, early assessments by NASA and the Air Force found that SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket development would cost nearly $4 billion to build. In reality, a subsequent NASA review determined the Falcon 9’s development cost was just $400 million.

“I think there’s also just a lot of slack in the defense industrial base, and an opportunity to improve costs there,” Allen said. “The strong existence proof there is SpaceX, which showed up and started with a very modest capability at a very cheap price, and then delivered a pretty exceptional capability still at a very cheap price.”

The CSIS reports cautions that the Air Force’s cost modeling for its fighter aircraft could become complacent, as well. It urges the service to not concede to a CCA price tag of $25 million or more before considering new approaches to reduce the program’s cost.

One concern could be relying too much on military-specific equipment that can only be produced by a small number of companies, Allen said. Waiting on long-lead items to deliver for months or even years could create delays in CCA deployment.

“A ramification of that is a lot of aircraft sitting in the factory 95 percent finished and unable to fly because of that lingering 5 percent, which would be a really, really lousy outcome,” he said.

Despite the potential for future delays and cost growth, the report largely praised the Air Force’s work on CCAs — emphasizing that it is the first real program of record at the Defense Department for an autonomous system. The Air Force is also devoting time to additional questions related to operational doctrine, infrastructure, training and lifecycle sustainment through an Experimental Operations Unit for the program, the document noted.

The service’s budget for the program is another key indicator that CCAs can move out of the “science project territory” that many new capabilities get stuck in and become an actual operational system, the report stated. According to its budget request for fiscal 2025, the Air Force plans to spend more than $6 billion on the CCA program and related projects over the next five years.

The report also points to the service’s acquisition approach — specifically its decision to give industry less stringent requirements to promote innovative designs, as well as the choice to divide the contracts into one lane focused on hardware and another on software.

Even though it might not work for every brand new capability, the approach is appropriate for CCAs given the current state of the defense technology industrial base, Allen said.

“You’ve got a really weak competitive landscape, just in terms of there either being a monopoly or a near monopoly,” he said. “The hardware side of that equation has really high upfront investment costs … If you’re trying to improve the competitive landscape in the DOD, software is a really nice starting point because, while it is expensive, the upfront costs are much lower so it’s easier to encourage new entrants into the ecosystem.”

In addition, the authors noted the importance of the Air Force’s Autonomy-Government Reference Architecture (A-GRA) in creating standards for vendors writing software and adding new capabilities, as well as ensuring CCAs will be interoperable with other platforms across the Defense Department. 

The report emphasized the importance of the award to Anduril, a nontraditional contractor backed by venture capital. The contract serves as a positive signal to those who may be considering investments in companies developing capabilities for the Pentagon, which could give a boost to the overall defense tech ecosystem, Allen said.

There are still some unanswered questions related to CCAs, such as whether they should be classified as an autonomous weapon system. It’s also unknown if the cutting-edge platforms will be enough to deter or defeat China’s growing military technology strength.

Nevertheless, Allen said he believes the success or failure of the program will influence other autonomous system efforts across the Defense Department.

“The fact that we’ve got a flagship program of record in a military service — and with an approach that other services appear ready to emulate — I think this is the turning point in the entire DOD for autonomy,” Allen said. “If this program goes well, I think that will be an accelerated turning point. And if this program encounters a lot of trouble, I think the overall shift will also encounter a lot of trouble.”

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Officials have cited advancements in technologies and budget uncertainty as reasons for reexamining the platform, which was expected to be the centerpiece of a networked family of systems. And while analysts who spoke with DefenseScoop agreed that both issues will influence NGAD’s fate, they also noted a number of different variables are likely shaping the Air Force’s considerations.

“Those decisions don’t get made in a vacuum. They have analyses and other things that underpin their investment decisions,” said Travis Masters, director of the Government Accountability Office’s contracting and national security acquisitions team and lead for the watchdog’s work on the NGAD program.

New missions, new technologies

The NGAD aircraft is envisioned as a long-range crewed fighter jet equipped with advanced sensors and weapons payloads designed to operate in highly contested environments in the Indo-Pacific, where China is seen as the top military threat to U.S. forces. Considered a replacement for the fifth-generation F-22 Raptor, NGAD’s main mission will be to establish air superiority.

Fielding a new air-superiority fighter for future operations is paramount, said Michael Bohnert, engineer and analyst at the RAND Corp. The Lockheed Martin-made F-22 has been in service for two decades, and the Air Force has requested to retire older Raptors — of which there are only 186 in operation — in its last few annual budget requests to Congress.

“There needs to be a replacement for the F-22, and the [F-35 Lightning] is not it,” Bohnert said in an interview. “The F-35 is a strike fighter, the F-22 is an air-superiority fighter. That is something you need to counter adversary bombers, heavier fighters, etc. It’s a mission set that you need something more like the follow-on to an F-22 to do.”

Although NGAD is a highly classified program, it’s thought that the platform will have improved stealth, significantly longer ranges and larger weapons, according to Mark Gunzinger, director of future aerospace concepts and capabilities assessments at the Mitchell Institute. 

He emphasized that no weapon system currently in the United States’ inventory would be able to effectively establish air dominance in the region.

“Not only would NGAD’s cancellation risk putting our air superiority forces further behind China, it would have a major impact on all U.S. military operations in the future,” Gunzinger wrote in an email to DefenseScoop.

Until recently, NGAD was thought to be on schedule to be fielded sometime in the 2030s. The Air Force announced last year that it intended to pick a prime contractor for the aircraft in 2024, with Lockheed Martin and Boeing widely considered to be the two main vendors vying for the program.

However, on June 13 Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin hinted the service might be reevaluating plans due to funding constraints. He later told reporters during a June 14 briefing that “deliberations are still underway” and that the department is “looking at a lot of very difficult options that we have to consider.”

The Air Force initially began NGAD concept studies with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 2014, later expanding its scope to include an entire family of systems comprising loyal wingman drones known as collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) and advanced command-and-control technologies.

In the last decade of research and development, it’s possible that emerging threats have forced the Air Force to reconsider some of its original requirements and take a brief hiatus before moving further into the acquisition phase, J.J. Gertler, senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Aerospace Security Project, said in an interview.

Now, the service may be considering a larger NGAD airframe, Gertler said, noting that a platform the size of a bomber may not be effective in a traditional dogfight, but would still dominate enemy air spaces. 

“Because you have a larger platform, you have a lot more range. It can go places and do things that a fighter couldn’t do,” he said. “That is where I’m guessing the current gap is. They started designing a fighter, and what they realized is they really need something more than that.”

Another factor likely influencing the Air Force’s deliberations are rapid advancements in unmanned technologies, especially its CCA efforts.

“What we are discovering, through leaning into our collaborative combat aircraft, is we’re not only looking at different ways to optimize human-machine teaming, but it’s also a different way of developing capabilities,” Allvin said during the June 14 media briefing.

Bohnert said it might be easy to integrate avionics and munitions onto unmanned platforms to accomplish some of those missions, but eventually the Air Force will need larger drones to accommodate additional size, weight and power requirements.

The extra mass provided by CCAs specifically developed for high-end fights will also help the Air Force in establishing air superiority, reducing any capability gap caused by a lack of operational F-22s, Gunzinger said. But because the drones are being designed to synergize with the Air Force’s sixth- and fifth-generation aircraft, he cautioned that “budget-driven actions like not acquiring sufficient [fifth-generation] F-35s and delaying the NGAD risk cutting the legs out from under the case for CCA.”

Budget woes

In an interview with Aviation Week published June 14, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall echoed Allvin’s comments regarding the uncertain future of NGAD, noting the department is examining “lots of new things” it hadn’t considered in years prior as it builds its budget request for fiscal 2026.

The service certainly has no shortage of budget-related concerns. Not only has the Fiscal Responsibility Act impacted the entire Defense Department’s budget, the Air Force is also developing other costly programs — including the B-21 Raider stealth bomber and the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile.

The situation is not unlike the Navy’s, which is experiencing financial constraints related to readiness of its current ships and delays on multiple new vessels. The service chose to drastically reduce spending on its sixth-generation fighter program — the F/A-XX — in its budget request for fiscal 2025 to focus on near-term aircraft readiness.

The Air Force requested $2.7 billion for the NGAD platform in its FY ’25 budget request, indicating that it planned to spend $19.6 billion on the aircraft over the next five years. Officials have previously estimated that jet would cost around $300 million per unit.

Gunzinger noted that lawmakers may overlook Kendall and Allvin’s comments as a mechanism to signal it needs more funding for NGAD, an assumption he disagreed with.

“Because of this chronic underfunding, the Air Force must now modernize almost every element of its aging forces, including the two legs of the nuclear triad it is responsible for — the ICBM force and nuclear-capable bombers. After funding nuclear modernization, there is little budget left for other modernization programs,” he explained.

As the Air Force creates its budget plans for FY ’26, it’s likely reckoning with several unknown factors along with financial constraints that could impact whether or not the service decides to cut funds from NGAD, Gertler noted.

First, lawmakers from the Senate Armed Services Committee are considering a special fund for the Sentinel ICBM in its version of the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, which could remove some or all of the burden of developing the $96 billion program from the Air Force. It was revealed in January that the effort will cost 37 percent more than originally expected, triggering a Nunn-McCurdy breach and subsequent review process.

Gertler also noted that the upcoming 2024 election and the possibility of a new administration or members of Congress with different priorities, is likely influencing the Air Force’s decision-making process.

“Right now, the Air Force is doing what it can with what it knows,” he said. “What it seems to know is that they need to change the NGAD aircraft from what they thought it was going to be.”

In addition, the service has a portfolio of other fighter jets needing upgrades and sustainment dollars. GAO’s Masters told DefenseScoop that having a “portfolio-level conversation” that includes all Air Force programs is critical when weighing tradeoffs and risks in a budget-constrained environment.

A 2022 report from the government watchdog recommended the Pentagon conduct an integrated acquisition portfolio review of all its manned fixed-wing fighter aircraft across both the Air Force and Navy that would analyze several programmatic elements. Since publication, the department has completed the review, which was given to the armed services committees in the House and Senate in February.

“Hopefully, that analysis should also be informing some of the decisions you’re hearing them talk about with regard to NGAD,” Masters said.

One option the Air Force could pursue moving forward would be to field a sixth-generation aircraft that the service can iterate on, adding new technologies and refreshing other capabilities while continuously learning from previous increments. The modular development approach is being used on a number of other Air Force efforts, particularly CCAs.

Allvin’s comments to reporters seemed to suggest that lessons it’s learning from CCA development are feeding into the Air Force’s other programs like NGAD, although he acknowledged that process isn’t a silver bullet for new systems.

“It’s the systems that make the difference,” he said. “So privileging design rather than very expensive hardware that is so expensive you can’t afford enough of them to be able to use, I think is one of the areas that we’re pursuing in several of the capabilities we’re developing.”

Masters noted there is value in taking an iterative approach, as it increases the likelihood that systems can be delivered on time and within budget with the capabilities warfighters need in the near term. 

And while costly programs will be expensive no matter what, the method could mitigate some cost growth caused by unexpected problems after platforms are fielded, he added.

“If you take an incremental or iterative approach — which means that after that first increment or that first iteration you have more certainty about what you’re pursuing — you can then more likely come in on your actual cost or closer to your actual cost and schedule numbers,” Masters said.

Another possibility involves the Air Force fielding an aircraft it knows is not exactly what it envisions as the final platform, while keeping Congress and all relevant stakeholders in the loop, Bohnert said. The service could deliver some aircraft quickly, then learn from its mistakes and follow up with a successor variant — similar to how the service fielded the F-15 Eagle during the Cold War.

“I think that actually should be a perfectly acceptable strategy of putting out something that’s mediocre, learning from it, and whatever has the B or the C [variant] is fine,” Bohnert said. However, “I’m not sure in today’s budget and red-tape environment that could fly,” he added.

If the Air Force’s reasoning for reexamining NGAD leans more towards budget constraints than a change in the threat environment, however, that might prompt lawmakers to perceive the aircraft as a “failed program” and allocate those funds elsewhere, Gertler said.

“If members understand why they’re doing it and that there is a defined future to the program, they’re generally a lot more willing to go along than if the Air Force is saying, ‘Well, we just want to take a break for a while and we’re not sure what comes next,’” he explained. “It’s a more thoughtful process than a lot of folks seem to be giving credit to, but it doesn’t appear to be budget driven — rather threat driven.”

Mark Pomerleau contributed reporting.

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The event was part of a larger Air Force effort to develop, test and mature autonomous capabilities that can eventually be integrated onto the service’s platforms, and Kendall’s demonstration flight marked another step in understanding how to bring AI-enabled operations from computer simulation into real-world applications to meet the department’s goals.

During the exercise over Edwards Air Force Base in California, an autonomous agent developed by Shield AI was integrated onto the X-62A VISTA (Variable In-flight Simulator Test Aircraft) that engaged with a manned F-16 in a within-visual-range air combat scenario — also known as a dogfight. While Kendall sat in the VISTA’s front seat, a human safety pilot sat behind him for the duration of the flight in case something went wrong and they needed to intervene.

For the demonstration, Shield AI put a technology known as reinforcement learning-based artificial intelligence onto the aircraft, Brett Darcey, executive vice president and head of product at the company, told DefenseScoop in a recent interview. The AI agent is a direct descendant of one used by Heron Systems — bought by Shield AI in 2021 — to win the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s AlphaDogfight Trials competition in 2020.

Since then, Shield AI has continued working with DARPA through its Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program to transition the technology to live aircraft through a number of real-world flights.

“We’ve proven a method for going from our laboratories to live airplanes. We’ve proven the method to both get the technology there, but also for our people to support some of the compliance and testing and verification pieces you need to do,” Darcey said. “We’ve proven that model, that reinforcement learning can fly and it is successful. And we’ve proven that the way we approach the problem is scalable.”

Reinforcement learning-based AI is a machine learning technique that trains algorithms to achieve a desired outcome using a trial-and-error process that mimics how humans make decisions. By “rewarding” positive behaviors and “punishing” negative ones during tests, the algorithm is able to sense and interpret its environment, take appropriate actions and continue learning.

During Kendall’s flight, the VISTA conducted a variety of high-intensity demonstrations to test different ways the AI agent could take control of the aircraft and maneuver into position to engage with the manned F-16. 

“We did about 10 or a dozen different situations where … I was in the front seat and I had a button on my stick where basically I initiated the automation,” he said May 8 at an AI expo hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project.

While that may seem straightforward, the technology is a highly complex system that also includes a set of tools, techniques and infrastructure used to develop reinforcement learning-based AI very specific to a dogfighting scenario, Darcey explained. 

“The specific autonomy that we put on there was not built to do anything civilian. It wasn’t even built to fly from point A to point B, necessarily,” he said. “It was meant to do something much more sophisticated, but limited in that we had to reason over a highly dynamic situation. So, where is the adversary, what is the adversary doing, how do I put my airplane in position to solve for both safety and weapons effectiveness?”

That’s not to say the AI could only be used in aerial combat, Darcey added. When extending the technology from its original simulation-based system to something able to operate in the real world, Shield AI “split up” the agent into modular blocks that allows them to be reconfigured in specific ways, opening up the ability to do other missions.

Hypothetically, that means a set of five blocks designed for a dogfight could be expanded into dozens of blocks able to accomplish more sophisticated tasks — such as engaging in a dogfight and then meeting up with a tanker to be refueled while traveling back to home base, he explained.

“Theoretically we can expand it quite easily. But in practice, complexity comes with lots of switching conditions, lots of places at the seams of two modules where the devil in the details lie and you have to work through that,” Darcey said. “You just have to handle more, you have to build more tasks and behaviors. So we’re working through that now.”

Shield AI is also working on the ability for pilots to control the AI agents in real-time and be able to adapt to new conditions through a separate partnership with Kratos. The company recently completed the first phase of flight-testing its AI agents on Kratos’ MQM-178 Firejet drone in an effort to develop a new configuration of Kratos’s Valkyrie robo-jet integrated with Shield AI’s autonomous pilot.

Through that independent program, the company has altered the AI to be able to receive new commands and then perform tasks that weren’t part of the pre-planned mission — a concept called tactical administrative maneuvering. The goal is to create autonomy that is “plannable, directable and trustable,” Darcey said.

“Autonomy isn’t this monolithic thing. There’s ways you build it out of your fundamental methods for command and control, or formation flying,” he said. “Different elements of a mission are going to be just different than if you get into something where you want to reason over a highly complex dynamic or tactical situation.”

Moving forward, Darcey said Shield AI plans to continue maturing its AI pilot through its work with DARPA and partnership with Kratos in anticipation for future programs aimed at bringing autonomy to the Air Force’s manned and unmanned platforms. The company is also keeping track of the other services’ AI endeavors. 

The Air Force is approaching final source selection for the first increment of its collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) program, which seeks to develop loyal wingman drones that will fly alongside the service’s manned aircraft. The department has also entered a tri-service agreement with the Navy and Marine Corps — both of which also want CCA drones — to standardize a handful of components on their respective platforms.

While Darcey could not confirm whether Shield AI was already working with the Air Force or other services specifically on the CCA program, he said the company “absolutely wants to be one of the companies that brings autonomy to those platforms, whatever they may be.”

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