https://www.twz.com/air/navys-vision...mes-into-focus
Navy’s Vision For Disposable Carrier-Based Loyal Wingman Drones Comes Into Focus
The Navy wants carrier-based drones to cost less than $15 million and be ‘consumed’ as weapons or targets when their short service ends.
The U.S. Navy wants its future fleets of
carrier-capable drone wingmen to be made up of designs that cost no more than $15 million to buy and have zero long-term sustainment costs. These uncrewed aircraft would be "consumable," ending their relatively short service lives, which will be measured in hundreds of flight hours rather than years, as one-way kamikaze drones or flying targets for use in training or testing.
The Navy is now actively using the phrase Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) to refer to its planned future drone force. These uncrewed aircraft will be highly autonomous, but still designed primarily to work closely together with crewed platforms, at least initially. The Navy's CCA program
is formally intertwined with
the Air Force's programof the same name, especially when it comes to architectures that will allow both services
to seamlessly exchange control of drones during operations, but the two efforts are distinct.
The Navy is currently aiming to begin fielding the first of its CCA drones sometime in the second half of this decade. The service also has a long-standing goal for the composition of its carrier air wings to eventually
become up to 60 percent uncrewed.
"For the U.S. Navy, we are in the development process" and "we're trying to get after CCA in a revolutionary way," Navy Rear Adm. Stephen Tedford, who runs the Program Executive Office for Unmanned Aviation and Strike Weapons, or PEO (U&W), within Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR), said on Monday. Tedford was speaking at the Navy League's annual Sea Air Space conference.
"I don't need them [CCAs] that long," Tedford continued. "I'm ... trying to do this so that my unit cost of the platform is as absolutely low as possible, trying to keep it around the 15 million dollar mark, okay, because I need it to be considered consumable. I want something that's going to fly for a couple hundred hours. It's last hour, it's either a target or a weapon."
"I'm not going to sustain it for 30 years," he added. "So, if you're [sic] any cost estimators out there, those are zeros in sustainment, okay. Just trust me. It's a zero. It's amazing."
The Navy's CCA plans also have the added wrinkle of the drones being expected to operate from the service's aircraft carriers.
"It's not a different way of launch and recovery, it's a different way of looking at risk," Tedford said when asked about how his CCA vision would translate to carrier-based operations. "I'm not trying to design a platform that's going to do cyclic operations on an aircraft carrier the way we know it today, where you're launching and recovering every 45 minutes to an hour and a half."
"That 200 [flight] hours [of total service life] may only have 10 cats and traps," the Rear Admiral added, referring to catapult launches from and arrested recoveries on carriers, which put significant strain on the airframe. "We're trying to limit that scope. ... If I only need to launch it and recover it a handful of times, instead of throughout its [traditional] lifecycle, I can completely change the engineering calculus a lot."
With all this in mind, Tedford said the service's main focus with regard to its CCAs isn't on the underlying drone, but about identifying what that uncrewed platform is expected to do. In turn, the Navy's attention is then on how to get those desired capabilities while staying within the identified cost and other parameters.
"Every time we talk about CCAs, because the last letter is an 'A,' ... they stop thinking about it as a weapon. They need to think about it as a weapon," Tedford explained. "So, we're going to focus on what do I need it to do, what sensors [do we need], and [what] gaps do we need to cover in combat?"
The Rear Admiral also made clear that his vision for CCAs involves buying them in a "rolling wave" of relatively small batches – dozens rather than hundreds at a time. When combined with "consumable" designs, this process will essentially supplant upgrade programs that aircraft might traditionally go through in the mid-life portion of their service.
By doing all this, "I can keep pace with the technology, all the unmanned platforms, but also keep pace with the threat by upgrading sensors, platform systems, weapons, and I can do it at a recurring investment cost," Tedford said......
"If I do try to design something that has 6,000 hours of life, and can do cats and traps all day, I just designed an F/A-18," Tedford said on Monday...... [more]