Army looking to field CCA-like capability potentially in ‘next couple of years’

Carley Welch 

Source Link

WASHINGTON — The Army is looking to acquire a Collaborative Combat Aircraft-like capability that could be delivered to the service in as soon as a “couple of years,” according to a top Army aviation leader.

“That has been a focus for the last … really year,” Brig. Gen. Cain Baker, director of the Future Vertical Lift Cross Functional Team, told reporters Wednesday at the annual AUSA conference here in Washington, DC. “As we go forward, we’re watching closely in our experimentation to develop a full requirement, potentially to deliver our capability over the next couple of years.”

The fleet of the drone wingman is currently being pursued by other services — the Air Force is in an active CCA competition and the Navy recently tapped four companies to produce “conceptual designs” — but before this week, it had not been reported that the Army was looking for its own CCA.

The Army has other autonomous air tech in the works, such as launched effects and drones. Launched effects can be a broad term but often refer to smaller drones that shoot out of something else mid-flight and can be used to collect information or strike targets. Now, the service plans to expand its autonomous air capability portfolio with a CCA-like option, and is working with the other services to find out what the right option may look like.

“We’re following the other services very closely as they’re looking at this, this concept capability. I think for the Army, especially launched effects, it comes down to a discussion of mass. How do we provide mass to the commander, to sense with launch effects,” Baker said.

“A platform you know, a loyal wingman, a CCA concept, allows you to increase mass while also reducing the amount of aviators you got to have in the air. So we’re working with both the INDOPACOM [Indo-Pacific Command], we’re working with Europe to look at the capabilities that they need in order to deliver that mass and really survivability.”

Regarding options of what this would look like for the Army, Gen. David Phillips, the Program Executive Officer of Aviation, told reporters that the service was exploring options last fall for a Group 4 vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) CCA-like capability. He said he teamed with industry to find out what such a capability could look like, but didn’t share what vendors were involved.