As announced a few days ago by Frank Kendall, US Under Secretary of Aviation, the company General Atomics Aeronautical Systems (GA-ASI), will be one of the two contenders (the second is the start-up Anduril), of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program ( CCA). The unmanned aircraft that will result from this process is expected to be the “loyal wingman” (Loyal Wingman) of both the 5th generation F-35 aircraft already in service today, as well as the future 6th generation NGAD fighters and stealth bombers B -21 Raider.
The issue for the airpower of the future is that manned combat aircraft are becoming increasingly expensive, both initially and throughout their operational life, while the pilot continues to be exposed to danger.
So this is where CCA comes in, as the program’s philosophy will deliver a low-cost (between $25-30 million), high-performance, high-volume, unmanned. The General Atomics proposal is called Gambit and aims to change the shape of complex air operations.
Gambit, named after the well-known chess opening tactic, is not a single drone, but a family of four:
- Gambit 1, intended for long-duration intelligence gathering, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) missions.
- Gambit 2, in the roles of protecting friendly air forces from enemy aircraft (A2A), ground attack and air defense suppression. With relatively less range than Gambit 1, due to carrying weapons in its internal storage.
- Gambit 3, high fidelity tutorial. This particular drone has two roles, teaching ground personnel and pilots to use the operational Gambit, but at the same time training them to deal with the corresponding enemy drones.
- Gambit 4, extremely low-observability flying wing, with the main mission of offensive reconnaissance in “saturated and hostile” environments. Due to his increased capabilities in the electromagnetic spectrum, he is able to take over the guidance and management of the strike Gambit.
One platform, many uses
Gambit’s design concept foresees 70% uniformity between the various types, with the aim of reducing production and maintenance costs. For this purpose, practices found in advanced automotive industries have been followed, with the basic platform of the system called Gambit CORE, being the same for each air vehicle and completely interchangeable between the different versions.
GA-ASI’s proposal is also accompanied by state-of-the-art flight and mission planning software, with artificial intelligence taking a primary role in the interconnection of all means, manned and unmanned, and in the distribution of information between them, thus achieving extremely short reaction times and high effectiveness.
In a related demonstration of this capability, an exercise was conducted involving the company’s MQ-20 Avenger unmanned aircraft, demonstrating that they can detect and track aerial targets while interacting with a large number of other aircraft, both real and virtual. In the same exercise, one Avenger executed a “Chase and Avoid” scenario, in fully autonomous mode, receiving real-time information from infrared search sensors, while in a second scenario, one real Avenger and five virtual ones, cooperated through artificial intelligence and engineering learning (AI, Machine Learning), in collective pursuit of goals as well as in collective defense.
The future is expected to be selectively manned
Future air forces will have a very difficult time maintaining the required number of aircraft to perform all missions. Power caps cannot drop beyond a certain limit and of course resources are not inexhaustible. Second, but not least, a pilot’s workload cannot be continuously increased.
Therefore, the solution offered by programs like CCA, Loyal Wingman, etc. are expected to bring a real revolution in the way operations will be planned, as they will be a combination of manned and unmanned vehicles in cooperation with each other and indeed without compromises.
