WASHINGTON — The Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program could prove to be the heart of America’s future airpower — but even as the technology is slowly developing, the service has a lot of questions to figure out how, exactly, it to wants to use these things.
To get to the heart of what CCAs are and how they will work, Breaking Defense assembled a panel — featuring reporters Michael Marrow and Valerie Insinna, alongside Stacie Pettyjohn of the Center for a New American Security think tank — to break down what every reader needs to know.
Above, you’ll find the second of four videos from that discussion. This one is focused on the kinds of complex questions Air Force planners are trying to sort out right now about concepts of operations, from how these wingmen can fly, to whether they need stealth capabilities, to how to get a pilot to actually trust that a CCA will do what they want it to.
Down below you can see our first video, which serves as a primer on just what the CCA program is. In the coming weeks, we’ll publish further videos, one on international efforts to replicate a loyal wingman program from both partners and potential adversaries, and another on the technology that will make CCA fly.
