Wittman: No ‘reservations’ about loyal wingman CCA drones’ affordability

WASHINGTON — In June 2023, members of the House Armed Services Committee attempted to set some guardrails in annual defense policy legislation for nascent efforts by the Air Force and Navy to field fleets of drone wingmen. 

Specifically, the lawmakers wanted to define three categories for the services’ forthcoming Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) programs, attaching functional definitions and price ceilings to each. After drawing an unusually strong rebuke from Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, the idea was not adopted — Congress opted instead to require detailed cost matrices and thresholds for the fiscal 2024 policy bill. In the time since, Air Force officials have had to ask lawmakers for permission to funnel more money into the effort, reasoning that a recently approved acquisition strategy prompted the service to refine its estimates. 

But now the man who leads the tactical air and land forces subcommittee that originally offered the language, Virginia Republican Rep. Rob Wittman, tells Breaking Defense he does not have particular concerns about CCA costs. 

“I don’t have reservations about affordability of CCA, because I think just by their very nature, they’re going to be much less expensive,” Wittman told Breaking Defense Wednesday on the sidelines of the Defense News conference in Washington, likely referring to the comparative cost of manned fighter aircraft.

“What I want to make sure of is that we don’t try to take a CCA that’s a basic platform and add a bunch of cost to it, because we have this requirement creep,” he said, echoing top Air Force officials who have emphasized the need to eschew tacking on endless requirements. “So I think as long as they keep it simple and straightforward, I think that it can stay within that realm of affordability.”

Keeping costs reasonable on this program is going to be critical, officials say, because if the drones’ unit prices are too high, the Air Force won’t be able to produce them in sufficient numbers. But at the same time, the service has capability requirements it needs to meet, which can often result in higher costs.

Finding that balance is going to be a challenge for the Air Force’s budding CCA program, which already has two vendors, General Atomics and Anduril, on contract alongside a parallel (and classified) pool of software developers. But while there are real cost implications for trimming performance, that doesn’t mean the government should give industry a pass for finding other ways around sticker shock, according to a recent report published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

“If [the Air Force is] going to spend $30 million on an aircraft, and they’re going to get something that’s 10 times better than an F-35, well, it’s hard to say that they’re getting a bad deal, right?” Gregory Allen, the director of the Wadhwani Center for AI and Advanced Technologies at CSIS and a coauthor of the report, said in an interview.

“But if they’re going to spend $30 million on an aircraft — which is about a third the cost of an F-35 — and they’re going to get something that’s only a third as good as an F-35, I think it’s sort of fair to say, like, is this the right strategy?”

Cost And Capability

Instead of necessarily sacrificing capability, Allen and coauthor Isaac Goldston argue the program should serve as an opportunity to find innovative ways to bring prices down. 

“…[A]lmost all of the cost-cutting conversation around CCA and its predecessors has revolved around sacrificing performance and lifespan rather than simply improving the operational efficiency of an aerospace and defense industrial base that is frequently bloated and sluggish,” they write. “The cost savings from sacrificing performance and lifespan are real: an engine meant to last 50 years will, of course, cost more than one meant to last a few months. But this program is also an opportunity for the Air Force to demand better from industry and use competitive pressure to drive better results.”

Allen and Goldston point to the example of SpaceX, whose entrance into the ULA-dominated market eight years ago for government medium- and heavy-lift launches quickly helped drive prices down without sacrificing quality. Developments like that, they argue, mean that the Pentagon “should be skeptical” when companies assert that cost reductions can only come at the expense of performance.

“The nature of SpaceX’s success was like a fanatical dedication to reducing costs, and a willingness to vertically integrate and develop technologies around existing problem sets that were being solved in expensive ways,” Allen said. That included outside-the-box thinking, he added, using an example where SpaceX avoided the need for expensive, radiation-hardened chips by opting instead for redundant avionics powered by commercially available semiconductors.

At this stage, it’s also not clear exactly what CCA will even be capable of based on public information, Allen said, highlighting a dearth of details about features like stealth and range. And there are other cost considerations, like R&D and sustainment, that aren’t neatly captured in a unit price, with the latter traditionally resulting in the bulk of a program’s costs. 

CCA, however, may be a program that by its nature is able to flip the traditional cost equation.

Officials like Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin have discussed eliminating long logistical tails on CCA — likely meaning the drones in some manner will be replaced more quickly than standard aircraft. That may mean higher procurement costs as the drones are rapidly replenished, but as long as production volumes are high enough, prices should come down due to economies of scale, Allen reasoned. 

“Whether or not they’re getting good value for money, I just reserve judgment at this stage,” Allen said. Nevertheless, he noted that sophisticated war games run by CSIS suggest the vast majority of aircraft will be destroyed on the ground as opposed to in the air in scenarios like a war with China, with F-35s just as vulnerable as CCA in that scenario. That being the case, “we probably don’t need an aircraft that is even more astonishingly capable than the F-35, what we really just need are more aircraft.”

To be sure, Allen and Goldston note in their report, the Air Force is getting a lot right in its CCA approach, such as separating hardware and software acquisition, including non-traditional firms and committing to continuous competition. Yet if the Pentagon is going to get the capabilities it needs to win a future fight, Allen stressed industry needs to take risks, particularly ones that could imperil profits. 

Some of that is already happening, Allen said, such as Anduril’s decision to launch a new factory with investor funds that could produce platforms, like CCA, from competitions the company hasn’t yet won. Similarly, Northrop Grumman has evidently moved on its own to carry out flight tests for the Model 437 aircraft produced by subsidiary Scaled Composites, though the company is being tight-lipped about its plans. 

“I think that’s an incredible endorsement of the wisdom of this approach. Kudos to Northrop for believing in themselves and willing to bet their investors money on it,” Allen said. “The DoD needs the companies to be willing to put their money at risk.”

Valerie Insinna in Washington contributed to this report.