The Most Consequential Drone Program of the Decade
Sometime in 2026, the United States Air Force will make a decision that shapes the future of aerial warfare: selecting which drone designs to produce for the first round of its Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program — commonly referred to as the drone wingman initiative. This is not a procurement decision about an individual weapons system. It is a foundational commitment to a new operational concept: manned fighter aircraft operating in coordinated formations with autonomous unmanned wingmen that can carry additional munitions, perform electronic warfare, conduct surveillance, and provide a force-multiplying "affordable mass" that offsets the declining size of the U.S. manned fighter fleet.
The Two Competitors: Anduril and General Atomics
The CCA Increment 1 competition has been contested between two fundamentally different organizations. General Atomics brings decades of proven unmanned aircraft experience, most notably from the Predator and Reaper programs that defined drone warfare in the post-9/11 era. Its CCA candidate draws on that institutional knowledge of high-reliability, long-endurance unmanned systems. Anduril Industries, founded in 2017, represents a different organizational philosophy: a defense technology startup built explicitly to compete with traditional prime contractors through faster development cycles, software-first engineering, and a willingness to absorb programmatic risk that larger defense organizations typically avoid. Both companies completed first flights of their CCA prototypes in 2025 — a milestone the Air Force described as a key validation of the program's technical foundations. A production decision is now expected in 2026.
The Operational Concept: Affordable Mass in Modern Conflict
The CCA program was shaped by a clear-eyed assessment of the arithmetic of modern air warfare. U.S. manned fighter inventories have declined substantially over the past two decades due to cost, attrition, and the long timelines of fifth-generation fighter production programs. Meanwhile, adversary air defenses and fighter fleets have grown in sophistication and numbers. The CCA concept addresses this asymmetry not by building more F-22s or F-35s — which take years and tens of billions of dollars — but by augmenting each manned aircraft with one or more autonomous wingmen that can extend the reach, payload, and survivability of the crewed platform. Officials have indicated that initial CCA variants will serve primarily as missile trucks — carrying additional air-to-air munitions beyond what a fighter aircraft can accommodate in its own weapons bays — while future variants may take on electronic warfare, intelligence collection, and suppression of enemy air defenses roles.
The Autonomy Layer: The Hidden Competition
The airframes being developed by Anduril and General Atomics are visible and discussed openly. Less visible is the parallel effort to develop the CCA's autonomy systems — the software and AI architectures that will allow these aircraft to operate collaboratively with manned fighters in complex, contested environments. According to Breaking Defense's reporting, contracts for this autonomy development have been issued to RTX (Raytheon Technologies) and Shield AI, and the work has proceeded largely classified. This reflects the Air Force's understanding that autonomous operation in a denied, degraded, and operationally limited environment — where GPS is jammed, communications are contested, and threat environments change rapidly — is an extraordinarily difficult software problem that requires its own dedicated development pipeline alongside the hardware program.
What Comes After Increment 1
The CCA program is explicitly designed as an iterative effort, not a single procurement. Increment 2 — the next round of CCA development — has already attracted early design contracts from nine companies, spanning a deliberately wide range of concepts from low-cost, attritable designs to more capable and sophisticated platforms. This breadth reflects the Air Force's deliberate strategy of preserving flexibility: it has not yet decided whether future drone wingmen should be cheap enough to be expended in combat (the attritable model, driven by lessons from Ukraine's use of consumable drones) or sophisticated enough to survive and return from high-threat environments (the survivable platform model, more analogous to traditional aircraft). The tension between these philosophies — and the budgetary implications of each — will define the next phase of the CCA program and the broader U.S. approach to autonomous combat aviation through the 2030s.
The Industrial Ecosystem Being Built Around CCA
Beyond Anduril and General Atomics, the CCA program is generating significant industrial activity across the defense supply chain. Propulsion companies are competing to supply low-cost engines suited to the power requirements of attritable drone wingmen — a market segment that did not exist at scale five years ago. Sensor manufacturers are developing compact, affordable radar and EO/IR systems optimized for CCA payloads. And the software ecosystem supporting autonomous flight, mission planning, and human-machine teaming is attracting substantial venture and government investment. The CCA program is, in this sense, not just a weapons acquisition — it is the demand signal that is catalyzing the construction of an entirely new segment of the U.S. defense industrial base.