The United States Air Force is building a fleet of uncrewed combat drones designed to fly alongside its most advanced manned fighters, while simultaneously awarding contracts for a next-generation crewed jet meant to counter China’s growing air power. Together, these programs represent the closest thing to a seventh-generation air combat architecture that any nation has publicly acknowledged. The tension between the two efforts, one focused on cheap, expendable AI-driven aircraft, and the other on a costly manned platform, reveals a deep strategic disagreement about what future air superiority actually requires.
Uncrewed Wingmen Take Flight
The Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program has moved from concept to concrete hardware. A CCA prototype took to the air for flight testing, marking a significant step toward fielding large quantities of modular uncrewed aircraft. The operational concept calls for these drones to operate alongside crewed fifth- and sixth-generation fighters, handling dangerous missions that would otherwise put pilots at risk. Rather than a single monolithic design, the program envisions multiple variants that can be swapped in and out depending on the mission, whether that means electronic warfare, reconnaissance, or direct strike.
Two prototype designations have emerged from the program. The YFQ-42A and YFQ-44A are the named airframes, according to a Congressional Research Service report that compiles official DoD statements and industry disclosures on the CCA effort. The incremental procurement approach behind these prototypes reflects a deliberate strategy: rather than betting everything on one airframe over decades, the Air Force wants to field successive waves of relatively affordable drones that can be updated or replaced as threats evolve. For a taxpayer accustomed to trillion-dollar fighter programs that stretch across generations, this modular philosophy represents a fundamentally different way of buying combat power.
The Digital Century Series Vision
The intellectual foundation for this rapid-iteration approach traces back to a concept called the Digital Century Series, which was discussed at senior Pentagon acquisition levels years before the CCA prototypes flew. During a press briefing, then-Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Ellen Lord fielded questions about the Digital Century idea and how it could reshape fighter procurement alongside existing programs. The concept borrowed from the Cold War era, when the Air Force cycled through multiple fighter designs in quick succession rather than locking into a single platform for decades. Applied to modern digital engineering, it suggested that new aircraft could be designed, tested, and fielded in five-year cycles instead of the traditional twenty or thirty.
That vision has partially materialized in the CCA program, but it also set the stage for a more ambitious and far more expensive effort: the Next Generation Air Dominance initiative, or NGAD. Where CCA aims for affordable mass, NGAD targets the high end of the performance spectrum, with a crewed fighter designed to operate in the most contested airspace on the planet. The friction between these two approaches, cheap and numerous versus expensive and exquisite, is the central strategic question facing the Air Force. Both programs draw from the Digital Century Series philosophy, but they answer very different questions about how wars will be fought.
Boeing Wins the F-47 Contract
The NGAD program’s secretive development became public in dramatic fashion when Trump announced that Boeing had won the contract for a future fighter jet, designated the F-47. The announcement, which framed China as a primary driver, immediately drew scrutiny over cost and strategic priorities. Critics questioned whether pouring resources into a single high-end manned platform made sense when the CCA program was already demonstrating that uncrewed systems could absorb many of the same missions at a fraction of the price. The debate is not abstract: every dollar spent on the F-47 is a dollar unavailable for the drone swarms that might ultimately prove more effective against Chinese anti-access systems.
The political dimensions of the contract added another layer of complexity. The Washington Post reported that Trump described the F-47 as his own fighter jet, linking the program’s identity to a sitting president in a way that few defense acquisitions have experienced. Boeing’s selection over competitors also raised questions about industrial base considerations, given the company’s well-documented production and quality challenges in both its defense and commercial divisions. Whether Boeing can deliver a cutting-edge air superiority platform on schedule and on budget is a legitimate open question that the F-47 designation alone does not answer.
AI Autonomy and the Limits of What We Know
The headline promise of an “AI war machine” reflects a real trajectory, but the public record has significant gaps. The CCA program’s stated operational concept involves uncrewed aircraft flying alongside manned fighters, which implies some degree of autonomous decision-making in contested environments where communications may be jammed or degraded. However, no declassified test results exist beyond flight milestones. The level of AI autonomy these prototypes actually exercise, whether they can independently identify and engage targets, or whether they remain tightly tethered to human operators, is not something the available DoD documentation specifies. Claims about AI-driven tactical advantages, such as faster reaction times or predictive maneuvering, remain speculative without published simulation data or exercise results.
Similarly, the “hypersonic, space-ready” elements of a theoretical seventh-generation fighter remain aspirational rather than documented. No primary DoD records describe exact hypersonic integration timelines for the F-47 or NGAD, and no official statements detail direct orbital interface specifications for any current program of record. The Air Force has signaled interest in these capabilities through budget requests and concept documents, but the gap between institutional aspiration and fielded hardware is wide. What is verifiable is that the CCA program has produced flying prototypes, that the F-47 contract has been awarded to Boeing, and that the strategic logic connecting cheap drones to expensive manned fighters is still being worked out in real time.
What a Seventh-Generation Architecture Might Mean
When observers describe this emerging mix of crewed and uncrewed systems as a seventh-generation architecture, they are really pointing to a shift in how airpower is organized rather than a single revolutionary airframe. In the CCA construct, a human pilot in a stealth fighter becomes more of a mission commander, directing several autonomous or semi-autonomous wingmen that extend sensors, weapons, and electronic warfare effects far beyond what one aircraft could carry. The F-47, if it enters service as envisioned, would anchor this formation with range, survivability, and the ability to penetrate dense defenses, while drones absorb the riskiest tasks and can be sacrificed without political blowback from pilot casualties.
This division of labor could alter everything from pilot training pipelines to maintenance infrastructure. Instead of building ever-smaller numbers of ultra-expensive fighters and asking them to do every mission, the Air Force would be fielding a layered ecosystem in which exquisite platforms are protected and amplified by cheaper ones. That model promises resilience in the face of attrition, but it also introduces new vulnerabilities in software, data links, and logistics chains. If adversaries can corrupt the algorithms that guide CCA swarms or sever their communications with crewed aircraft, the advantage could evaporate quickly. In that sense, the race to field AI-enabled combat systems is as much about securing code and networks as it is about pushing airframes and engines to new performance thresholds.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
