Parth Satam
CCAs would support the U.S. Air Force’s 4th and 5th gen fighters by harassing and creating targeting dilemmas for PLA forces, shaping their decisions in favor of U.S. forces.
The most concrete vision of the employment of Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCAs) against the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the western Pacific emerged during a 2024 Tabletop Exercise (TTX) led by the Mitchell Institute of Aerospace Studies (MIAS), which saw the participation of three teams of the U.S. Air Force, its Air Mobility Command (AMC) and industry.
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While laying out how the AI-enabled “recoverable” and “expendable” CCAs will complement the service’s diminishing fleet of Generation 4, 4.5 and 5 aircraft to confront China’s massive fleet, the study also focused on the logistics of operating CCAs while forward-basing them in the First Island Chain.
CCAs are now envisioned to add the required mass, present “targeting dilemmas;” “complicate China’s counter air operations” focusing on its Integrated Air Defense System (IADS), Surface Action Groups, KJ-500 AEW&C aircraft; “disrupt” and “impose crippling costs on its forces;” “distributed” CCA posture on the ground complicating China’s ability “to find, fix and track” the aircraft as they generate “decisive combat power” inside its A2/AD umbrella, all with aim of helping U.S. forces “drive the timing and tempo of a conflict.”
While this was the conceptual and theoretical end of the doctrine, the logistical side of CCA operations aimed at analyzing their refueling, maintenance, rearming processes, boiling down to how the CCAs are even designed. Subsequently, in a podcast hosted by MIAS’s Director of Future Concepts and Capability Assessments Mark Gunziger with representatives from Kratos, Anduril and General Atomics, the industry representatives called for rapid and immediate fielding of the CCAs, at least the Increment 1 variants, to allow units to begin experimenting and figuring out how to use them
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