AURORA, Colo. --- The U.S. Air Force will field 200 Next-Generation Air Dominance aircraft and notionally 1,000 Collaborative Combat Aircraft, and will request funds in the fiscal 2024 budget to develop these new systems, Secretary Frank Kendall said in his keynote address at the AFA Warfare Symposium on March 7.
The next generation of air dominance will include both the Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter platform “and the introduction of uncrewed collaborative aircraft to provide affordable mass and dramatically increased cost effectiveness,” Kendall said.
The “notional” 1,000 CCA figure was derived from “an assumed two CCAs for 200 NGAD platforms, and an additional two for each of 300 F-35s,” Kendall said.
He cautioned that “this isn’t an inventory objective, but a planning assumption to use for analysis of things such as basic organizational structures, training and range requirements, and sustainment concepts.”
Exactly how many NGAD platforms the Air Force is planning to buy has been a closely-held secret, and even if it is “notional,” the 200 figure is revealing in that it is greater than the current inventory of F-22s which the NGAD will eventually succeed circa 2030.
Kendall has previously said as many as five CCAs could collaborate with each crewed fighter—performing missions in electronic warfare, suppression of enemy air defenses, air and ground protection, and communications—but he has also said the process of introducing them will be iterative.
Asked in a later press conference why the planning figure mentioned 300 F-35s—when the Air Force inventory objective of 1,763 F-35s has not changed since the program’s inception—Kendall said it is “just a reasonable starting point. It’s somewhat arbitrary.” (end of excerpt)
(Click here for the full story, on the Air & Space Force magazine website.)
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