The U.S. Air Force is pushing its Collaborative Combat Aircraft program toward real-world combat testing, marking a significant step in the military’s effort to pair autonomous drones with manned fighter jets. The program centers on low-cost, unmanned systems designed to fly alongside F-35s and next-generation crewed aircraft, absorbing the most dangerous mission roles that would otherwise put pilots at risk. As great-power competition with China intensifies, the program’s progress carries direct implications for how the United States plans to fight future air wars.
What the CCA Program Actually Builds
The Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft initiative, often shortened to CCA, is not a single drone but a family of autonomous systems built to operate in tandem with human-piloted fighters. A nonpartisan analysis from the Congressional Research Service consolidates the program’s facts and timelines, describing Increment 1 as the initial production phase focused on fielding attritable drones. The word “attritable” is key: these aircraft are designed to be cheap enough that losing them in combat is an acceptable cost, unlike a $100-million-plus F-35. That economic logic drives much of the program’s architecture and ambition.
The Air Force has designated CCAs as Group 5 unmanned aircraft systems, a classification reserved for the largest and most capable drones in the military’s inventory. The CRS document traces the Air Force designation history for these platforms and outlines a software approach that emphasizes modularity. Rather than locking each drone into a fixed mission profile at the factory, the service wants to push rapid software updates that can reconfigure what a CCA does between sorties. That flexibility is the technical backbone of the entire concept: a single airframe that can shift from electronic warfare to strike to reconnaissance based on the software loaded before takeoff.
Anduril’s Fury and the Industrial Race
Among the companies building toward the CCA requirement, Anduril Industries stands out for its unconventional path into defense contracting. The CRS report references Anduril’s acquisition history, including its purchase of Area-I, a small drone maker whose technology became the foundation for the Fury prototype. That acquisition gave Anduril an existing airframe and flight-test record to build on, compressing the timeline from concept to flyable hardware. The Fury is now one of the key prototypes tied to the Increment 1 effort, and the CRS document references its reported first-flight timing as a program milestone.
What makes Anduril’s approach distinct from legacy defense primes like Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman is its Silicon Valley-influenced software development model. Instead of treating software as an afterthought bolted onto a finished airframe, Anduril builds the autonomy stack as the central product, with the aircraft serving as its physical host. The CRS analysis notes the program’s broader software approach, which aligns with this philosophy: the Air Force wants CCAs that can receive over-the-air mission updates and collaborate with manned wingmen through shared data links. Whether Anduril or another contractor ultimately wins the largest production contracts, the program’s design philosophy has already shifted the industrial expectations for how military drones get built.
Why Manned-Unmanned Teaming Changes Air Combat
The core operational concept behind CCA is not simply adding more drones to the fleet. It is about changing the risk calculus of contested airspace. A pilot flying an F-35 into heavily defended territory currently faces anti-aircraft systems, electronic jamming, and opposing fighters simultaneously. Under the CCA model, that same pilot would direct a formation of autonomous wingmen that absorb the most dangerous tasks: flying ahead to draw fire, jamming enemy radar, or striking defended targets while the manned aircraft stays at a safer distance. The pilot becomes a mission commander rather than the tip of the spear.
This shift carries real consequences for force structure and budget planning. If each manned fighter can control multiple CCAs, the Air Force can generate more combat power per pilot, partially offsetting the chronic pilot shortage that has plagued the service for years. The planned manufacturing outlined in the CRS document suggests the Air Force envisions producing these drones at scale, though exact production numbers and per-unit cost targets remain closely held. The economic argument is straightforward: losing a CCA in combat is a financial setback measured in the low millions, while losing an F-35 and its pilot represents an irreplaceable loss in both dollars and human capital.
The Autonomy Question No One Has Answered
Most public discussion of autonomous combat drones skips past the hardest question: how much independent decision-making authority will these systems actually have? The CCA program’s software approach, as described in the CRS analysis, emphasizes collaborative autonomy, meaning the drones are designed to work with human oversight rather than operate as fully independent killing machines. But the line between “collaborative” and “autonomous” blurs quickly in a real fight. Communications links can be jammed. A pilot managing multiple drones in a high-threat environment may not have time to approve every engagement. The technical architecture must account for what happens when the human in the loop loses contact with the machine.
This is where the CCA program intersects with a broader policy debate that the Pentagon has not fully resolved. Department of Defense policy requires a human to authorize the use of lethal force, but the speed of modern air combat, especially against a technologically advanced adversary like China, may outpace human reaction times. The CCA’s modular software design could theoretically allow different autonomy levels to be loaded depending on the mission and the threat environment. A low-risk patrol might keep humans tightly in control, while a high-threat strike deep inside enemy airspace might grant the drone wider latitude to defend itself. The CRS document does not resolve this tension, but the program’s design choices will inevitably force the Air Force to draw clearer lines about what machines can decide on their own.
What Stands Between Testing and the Battlefield
Even with prototypes flying and congressional interest growing, several gaps remain between the CCA program’s current state and actual combat deployment. The most significant is integration. Flying a drone by itself is a solved problem. Flying a drone that seamlessly shares sensor data, deconflicts weapons employment, and adjusts its flight path in real time alongside a manned fighter is a different engineering challenge entirely. The Air Force has not publicly released detailed integration protocols for how CCAs will mesh with existing tactical data links and command-and-control networks, and the CRS document flags this as an area where program timelines could slip if software and communications standards are not nailed down early.
Testing will also have to move beyond carefully scripted demonstrations and into exercises that simulate the chaos of real combat. That means validating how CCAs behave when GPS is denied, when data links are intermittently jammed, and when rules of engagement change mid-mission. It also means proving that maintenance crews can keep large numbers of these aircraft flying without the intensive support footprint associated with high-end fighters. Until the Air Force can show that CCAs can be generated, tasked, and recovered at scale under realistic conditions, the program will remain a promising concept rather than an operational revolution.
More from Morning Overview
*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
