Up to six designs could move ahead in Air Force’s next robot-wingman effort

DAYTON, Ohio—Up to six designs could be brought to the prototyping phase of the second round of the Air Force’s drone-wingman effort next year, a service official told reporters on Tuesday.

Increment 2 of the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft competition is well underway, Col. Timothy Helfridge, the fighter portfolio acquisition executive, told reporters at the Life Cycle Industry Days conference here. By roughly mid-2027, Helfridge expects, there could be “up to” half a dozen designs.

“We have another approximately 10 months left of our concept-refinement contract, where we would expect to have the refined attributes as we did before, as well as several closed conceptual designs,” he said. “We’re shooting for roughly six, but we’ll see what we end up with.”

In December, the Air Force announced that nine companies had received contracts to refine concepts for Increment 2 CCAs, and that 11 more remain eligible to compete in later phases of the effort. 

“Increment 2 will be structured similarly to Increment 1, where more than one awardee may be selected for prototyping,” an Air Force official told Defense One late last year. “This approach allows for competitive development and ensures that the Air Force can evaluate various solutions before selecting the final designs to move into production.”

In 2024, service officials funded initial Increment 1 work by Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman, Anduril, and General Atomics, but ultimately only the latter two were chosen to build prototypes and then to begin production.

Northrop Grumman’s largely self-financed CCA earned its prototype an Air Force designation and made it eligible for the first increment, but it did not win a production contract. 

Helfrich said other unexpected entrants might eventually compete for Increment 2.

“We will continue to maximize competition through all the phases of CCA Increment 2. So we may have entrants that come in in a later phase that were not part of concept refinement,” he said. “We have to maximize the learning as soon as we can.”

This week, just outside of Dayton, Anduril unveiled the first Fury CCA produced at its facility near Rickenbacker Airport in central Ohio. The Air Force has already been experimenting with a prototype Fury and with General Atomics’ Dark Merlin CCA.

Service officials said in a Tuesday press release that the Air Force used the CCAs as part of a recent multi-day Agile Combat Employment exercise at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.

“This exercise was about getting the systems into the hands of the warfighter,” Lt. Col. Matthew Jensen, the Experimental Operations Unit commander, said in a press release. “We are focused on operating CCA outside of a traditional test environment so we can continue to learn, inform and rapidly iterate.”