The Debrief: Will CCAs Need Defensive Systems?

Syracuse, New York-based SRC Inc. has unveiled an electronic support measures (ESM) payload for a Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA).

The first defensive payload expressly designed to suit the needs of the new class of autonomous aircraft raises a question: Will the CCAs need it?

The nonprofit research and development corporation thinks so. The same company that developed the high-performance computing Agile Condor pod believes CCAs will need a modern ESM suite, but with an important caveat—it must be affordable.

The newly unveiled Ghost Mantis combines the functions of a radar warning receiver, decoy emulator and self-protection jammer into the same multifunction array.

That means that during the same mission, a CCA equipped with Ghost Mantis can identify the radio frequency (RF) signature of a hostile threat, masquerade as a crewed fighter by emulating its RF signature and then jam any radar-guided threats headed its way.

Such a package has become a standard electronic warfare kit on crewed aircraft, along with warning systems and countermeasures for heat-seeking threats. But CCAs are a new category defined in part by their relative affordability. The concept evolved from the Low-Cost Attritable Aircraft Technology (LCAAT).

The awkward term “attritable” comes with a fluid definition. It fits in a gap between disposable and reusable. At one time, the Air Force Research Laboratory put a price tag on it. Disposable munitions generally fell below about $2 million. Reusable aircraft cost more than $20 million. Anything in between was defined as attritable. In other words, cheap enough to lose on the first mission, but ideally could be recovered.

When the Air Force replaced LCAAT with the CCA concept, however, officials redefined the term “attritable” as simply uncrewed, and therefore, by definition, expendable.

The average unit cost estimate of the CCA rose to between one-third to one-fourth of a Lockheed Martin F-35, creating a range of roughly $23-$31 million at Lot 16 flyaway unit rates.

The estimated price range for the CCA leaves little room in the budget for nice-to-have features. The bill of materials for CCA already includes the airframe, engine, targeting sensors and—not least—software and processing capable of performing advanced autonomous behaviors.

But survivability remains a concern. Recent wargames performed by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies found the key factor desired by CCA operators, and it was not to achieve reusability. In combat, the armed CCAs needed to survive long enough to reach the launch points for their munitions, the think tank said in a February report.

Some industry officials have echoed the think tank’s findings. In July, Northrop Grumman Aeronautics President Tom Jones said he was concerned that survivability requirements are being overlooked in the Air Force’s selected CCAs so far.

“There’s probably a fine line between getting the survivability of a platform right so it can deliver effects and where it would be much less effective at doing that,” Jones said at the Global Air and Space Chiefs conference in London.

Survivability is a function of passive and active features. The former includes the shape and materials of the airframe, engine inlets and control surfaces, with the goal of reducing their visibility in all bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. Active features require systems that provide situational awareness and countermeasures to potential threats.

That is where Ghost Mantis—or any of its future competitors—might come in.

The focus of SRC’s designers called for keeping the cost of the system as low as possible while meeting certain performance requirements, said Dave Toomey, SRC assistant vice president of business development.

“It’s ‘OK, how much money is going to be available for that payload on that sensor?’” Toomey said in an interview. “We’ve heard [Air Force] Secretary Frank Kendall talk $20 million, we’ve heard $30 million, and somewhere in between the two of those for the entire platform.

“We said, all right, let’s go down to the low-single-digit millions and see what we can build,” Toomey added. “Because we know, when you put mission systems on there, you put sensors on there, when you put payloads on there, and you put [command and control systems] on there, you’re going to get up to that $25 to $30 million level really quick. That’s how we settled on that low-single-digit million dollar range.”