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Anduril rendering of its Fury aircraft, which is in the running for the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program.
The U.S. Air Force’s top commander has refuted the Lockheed Martin CEO’s characterization of the first batch of Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), telling Aviation Week that the first increment of the autonomous, uncrewed fighters will be capable of deploying in combat missions by the end of the decade.
Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin clarified the record after Lockheed’s Jim Taiclet told analysts on Oct. 22 that the first increment of CCAs would be limited to being a proof of concept and to strictly experimental roles, leaving combat missions for the follow-on order of CCAs in Increment 2.
“The CCA program is far more than a proof of concept,” Allvin said.
The aircraft fielded under the Increment 1 contract will offer a “credible operational capability,” he added.
“We are on track to field CCA Increment 1 by the end of the decade to meet peer threats and increase crewed aircraft survivability in contested environments,” Allvin said.
Asked to respond to Allvin’s rebuttal, a Lockheed spokesperson did not directly address the differences over the Increment 1 role.
“We firmly support the U.S. Air Force family of systems vision and are making strategic investments to enable next level integrated operations,” the spokesperson said.
Taiclet said on Oct. 22 that his team had been informed differently about Increment 1.
“The way it’s been described to us is Increment 1 was proof of concept, more of an experimental kind of approach,” Taiclet told analysts during Lockheed’s third-quarter earnings call.
“Increment 2 is going to be targeted to be a fieldable, combat-ready [and] scalable design and production of the uncrewed teaming half of the system,” Taiclet said.
Taiclet prefaced his remarks by saying that Lockheed is interested in competing for the second increment of CCAs, not the first.
The back-and-forth over Increment 1 comes as the CCA vision is still being turned into reality.
So far, the Air Force has awarded contracts to build Increment 1 prototypes to Anduril and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. A follow-on production contract is scheduled to be signed in 2026 following an open competition. The Increment 2 prototypes will also be awarded to one or more contractors in 2026, followed by production starting in 2028.
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