AUSA 2024 — General Atomics could ramp up production of autonomous combat drones to a rate of one aircraft per day in two to three years if given the signal by the Defense Department, the company’s head of aeronautics told Breaking Defense.
The Air Force has yet to award a production contract for its drone wingman, known as Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), nor has it laid out a definitive plan for how quickly it plans to acquire at least 1,000 drones across the lifespan of the program.
However, General Atomics has already begun assessing what it would take to meet potential future needs for the other US services as well as international customers, which could lead to a market that is closer to 2,000 CCAs, Dave Alexander said in an interview at the Association of the US Army conference.
“The question is, how quick can you get them there?” he said. “How long do you want to take to get 2,000 built?”
At peak production, the dronemaker manufactured one aircraft from its unmanned fleet every three days, for a rate of about 100 per year, Alexander said. “It’s not a far stretch for us to turn that into one per day on a single aircraft with productionization and automation, which we’re investing in today.”
General Atomics could scale to build a CCA every two days “without lifting a finger” at its existing 5 million square foot production plant in Poway, Calif., Alexander said. To go faster, the company would need to expand its footprint with additional facilities, but the level of capital investments required would be “not huge,” he added.
In April, the Air Force awarded contracts to General Atomics and defense tech startup Anduril to build CCA prototypes, which are expected to make their first flights next year ahead of a production decision in 2026. Service officials have repeatedly stated that it could put CCAs from one or both vendors into production, or that it could opt to buy CCAs from other vendors that were previously cut from the competition.
Since the prototype contracts were announced, both General Atomics and Anduril have waged a technological and public relations battle, with both companies hyping up their ability to develop a semi-autonomous combat drone that will fight alongside fighter jets — a capability that is completely novel for the Air Force — and build those CCAs at scale.
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General Atomics is investing in technologies to make CCA production quicker and more efficient than the days of the MQ-1 Predator and early models of the MQ-9 Reaper, when the drones were essentially fabricated by hand, Alexander said.
“Our goal right now [is] to squeeze out the touch labor, and get the automation in there. And that affects the design,” he said. The company is looking at “how would we automate actually building parts with robots, kind of like you would have in an automotive production line, so that this thing can come together much, much faster, with less touch labor.”
For example, General Atomics is bringing in robotic systems that can lay up composite fibers, which can build composite aircraft structures like wings more efficiently than humans can manually. The company is also incorporating more additive manufactured parts in that effort to cut human touch labor while cutting material waste, Alexander said.
General Atomics is not the only potential CCA manufacturer trumpeting its production capabilities. Anduril has also touted its plans to build weapons systems like CCA at “hyperscale” at a factory it has dubbed “Arsenal.” It plans to announce the location of the new production plant this year.
An expeditionary, short take off CCA
In addition to the focus on the Air Force program, Alexander said General Atomics is evaluating new variants of the Gambit drone that forms the basis of its CCA offering.
For example, on its Gambit 5 — a proposed version that can be launched from an aircraft carrier — the company hopes to add capability meant to enable expeditionary operations, such as the ability to take off from “very, very short runways,” he said.
He declined to comment on the specific takeoff length for the proposed variant, as well as how the drone would be launched, though he acknowledged that some additional launch equipment would be needed.
“We’re working on concepts that we will reveal in time, but we’re very bullish about our ideas,” Alexander said.