https://aviationweek.com/defense-spa...-loyal-wingman
US Air Force Plots Fleet Insertion Path For ‘Loyal Wingman’
The format of the U.S. Air Force’s “fireside chat” series is well-understood. A technology pioneer such as Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson or Mark Cuban appears onstage at an Air Force-affiliated event, counsels an audience of pilots and airmen about innovation and, not least, tries not to offend anyone. Elon Musk arrived at the Air Warfare Symposium on Feb. 28 with a different plan.
The founder of SpaceX and Tesla, who seems to delight in publicly tweaking established competitors in the space market such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, sat on the Air Force Association’s (AFA) stage and declared that the fighter aircraft—for decades the heart of the Air Force’s tactical combat capability—is already irrelevant. “The fighter-jet era has passed,” Musk said, provoking audible gasps and murmurs in an audience peppered with officers clad in flight suits. Lt. Gen. John Thompson, Musk’s interviewer, quickly changed the subject........But Musk’s remarks only differed with those of senior Air Force officials at the same event in the details of timing and scope. For over a year, Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics, has championed a vision of future airpower populated by numerous, small batches of autonomous aircraft augmenting manned fighters with specialized capabilities. For the first time, Gen. James Holmes, head of Air Combat Command (ACC), offered a path to introducing such aircraft into the fleet around 2025-27.
In the near term, the Air Force is focused on replacing aging F-15C/Ds with a mix of Boeing F-15EXs and Lockheed Martin F-35As. The Air Force decided to add the F-15EX to its inventory last year even as the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) began experimenting with a new class of low-cost aircraft with an “attritable” value.
The first such experimental aircraft, the Kratos XQ-58A Valkyrie, in March 2019 completed the first of four flights made to date. Next year, the Air Force plans to fly the XQ-58A or a similar aircraft with an artificial intelligence “brain,” which allows the so-called Skyborg aircraft to learn maneuvers as it flies. Such capabilities are not far from Musk’s vision of future air combat, but they are too immature to replace a fleet of F-15Cs on the verge of being grounded; hence, the decision to buy the F-15EX instead.
The next opportunity to introduce a new kind of aircraft comes in about 5-8 years, Holmes says. That timing dovetails, perhaps intentionally, with the schedule for maturing aircraft such as the XQ-58A and Skyborg. The Air Force will need to replace hundreds of F-16 Block 25s and Block 30s, which entered production in the mid-1980s.
“There’s an opportunity there if we want to cut in something new, a low-cost attritable, loyal wingman and the different things that we’re looking at and experimenting with,” Holmes says.
In late February, Holmes and Roper met to discuss the meaning of a “fighter aircraft” in the future with the Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program in the backdrop. The program office for NGAD began operations in October, with a focus on inventing a new production process capable of affordably producing small batches of advanced aircraft every 3-5 years. But Air Force officials are still grappling with the definition of basic requirements such as range and payload, as operations in the vast Pacific Ocean dominate the calculations.
“The equation and the kind of math that we use for a fighter still works pretty well in the European environment—the range and payload and distance,” Holmes says. “It’s not as effective a solution in the Pacific, because of the great distances. So as you look at NGAD and you look at the following programs, I wouldn’t expect it to produce things that necessarily look like a traditional fighter.”.........
The XQ-58’s performance helps define the new class of aircraft, called “loyal wingman” in the U.S. and “remote carriers” in Europe. A critical feature shared by the XQ-58 and similar aircraft such as the Boeing Airpower Teaming System (ATS) is range. Both are capable of flying 3,000 nm unrefueled, almost three times the range of the F-35. Unlike the ATS, the XQ-58 does not need a runway to land, and instead deploys a parachute.........