How The USAF Is Preparing For European Allies To Join The Collaborative Combat Aircraft Club
Senior U.S. Air Force leaders in Europe say NATO allies are increasingly looking to participate in the development and employment of collaborative combat aircraft (CCAs), even as several of those same countries pursue their own indigenous fighter and drone programs. American commanders say they are looking forward to CCAs expanding the alliance’s overall capacity, and are already pushing for such systems to work together from the outset.
Speaking yesterday at the Air & Space Forces Air, Space and Cyber Symposium that TWZ is attending, Lt. Gen. Jason T. Hinds, commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, U.S. Air Forces Africa, and NATO’s Allied Air Command, and Chief Master Sgt. Joshua J. Wiener, USAFE-AFAFRICA’s command chief, discussed how the command is preparing for an eventual European role in the U.S. Air Force’s planned fleet of hundreds of CCAs.
The issue is particularly significant for USAFE, which operates a fraction of the fighter force it maintained in Europe during the Cold War, even as many of its NATO allies contend with shrinking fleets of crewed combat aircraft. This comes against a backdrop of deepening tensions with Russia and the emergence of new kinds of threats. Autonomous aircraft that can augment crewed fighters could provide the alliance with additional combat mass without requiring a corresponding increase in the number of crewed aircraft and personnel permanently based in Europe.
“I’m excited about what CCAs have in store for the Air Force,” Hinds said, pointing to recent comments from the Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink, including the aim of having at least 500 CCAs in service by 2032.
He added that European interest in these kinds of platforms is already growing.
“I think you’re going to see a lot more interest from other nations inside Europe about what is America doing with CCAs and how they can join this party, if you will,” Hinds said.
Germany is “heavily involved,” he said, while Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands are also showing interest.
In the case of Germany, we have previously explored how that country is looking to procure CCAs by 2029. Sweden, too, recently unveiled a concept for a high-end, stealthy CCA-type drone, while the Dutch are looking to become more closely alligned with U.S. Air Force CCA efforts.
USAFE is currently using two broad operational scenarios to explain to allies how CCAs could fit into NATO’s force structure.
The first is defensive. A CCA could operate as part of an integrated air and missile defense network, potentially engaging one-way attack drones or cruise missiles without the need for expensive crewed fighters.
The second is offensive. In that scenario, autonomous aircraft could help suppress or destroy integrated air defense systems and potentially attack fielded forces during an effort to repel a hostile incursion into NATO territory.
Allies are interested in both missions, Hinds said, and want the ability to incorporate CCAs into their own force designs. Interestingly, only yesterday, Anduril shared photos of its YFQ-44A Fury configured with air-to-ground weapons, underscoring the fact that the CCA could take on an air-to-ground role in the future in addition to its current air-to-air focus.
That kind of interest has already prompted work at the NATO level. Hinds pointed to a study by the Joint Air Power Competence Center, the alliance’s airpower think tank based in Kalkar, Germany, examining how NATO members could employ CCAs in a modular fashion, including issues such as sustainment, training, and exercises.
“It was a pretty long paper, but the nations wanted it,” Hinds said.
Initial experimentation is expected to take place in the United States, but European experimentation could follow, including by Sweden and potentially other NATO members.
At the same time, European countries are not simply waiting for an American CCA to arrive.
The United Kingdom has launched its own Storm Fighter CCA program. Germany is pursuing a separate loyal-wingman effort, while the United Kingdom, Italy, and Japan are meanwhile jointly embarked on the Global Combat Air Program, or GCAP, which is intended to produce the Tempest next-generation crewed fighter and associated uncrewed systems.
The proliferation of national programs raises an obvious question: How does NATO prevent a growing fleet of autonomous aircraft from becoming a collection of incompatible national systems?
Hinds said the answer starts with commonality.
“The first and foremost thing is we want to strive for commonality,” he said. “Commonality means we don’t even have to worry about interoperability.”
Where common equipment is not possible, however, USAFE wants interoperability built into national systems from the beginning.
“Interoperability by design” is the preferred approach, Hinds said, with NATO data standards and other requirements incorporated before a system enters service rather than retrofitted later.
The good news for USAFE is that NATO already has extensive experience establishing common standards for interoperability, covering everything from tactics and procedures to communications, datalinks, weapons employment, and other technologies. That existing framework gives the alliance a foundation for integrating increasingly diverse national systems without requiring every member to field identical equipment.
Hinds did warn that some countries have previously acquired equipment that was not compatible with NATO systems, leaving them with the choice of paying to modify their own equipment or forcing the alliance to adapt its systems around it.
That problem becomes particularly important as autonomous aircraft are connected to increasingly complex sensor and weapons networks. Even more important is the requirement for a baseline command-and-control network for CCAs themselves, allowing different platforms to manage them seamlessly.
The ability to share and control CCAs across a complex battlespace is already emerging as both a major opportunity and a significant integration challenge. The U.S. Air Force and Navy, for example, have made clear that their respective CCAs are being developed with the ability to be controlled seamlessly across services, pointing toward a future in which autonomous aircraft need not remain tied to the service or platform that launched them.
Hinds described a potential kill chain in which an F-35 detects a target, passes the information to another node in the network, and a ground-based system operated by another NATO country ultimately launches the weapon.
In such an architecture, the aircraft, sensor, command-and-control network, and weapon do not necessarily have to belong to the same country.
As an example, Dutch F-35s, operating in Europe, have used a data-exchange system to transmit targeting coordinates to Israeli-made PULS (Precise and Universal Launch System) rocket artillery. The system, developed by Lockheed Martin is known as Keystone, and you can read more about it here.
USAFE is making “significant advances” in areas including cross-servicing, cross-loading, and cross-flying allied aircraft, Hinds said, all of which are intended to make multinational operations more seamless.
The same philosophy applies to weapons.
“We want to have all the fires, right? Whether it’s U.S. built or built inside European nations,” Hinds said.
That could prove increasingly important as European countries expand domestic production of missiles, drones, and other weapons alongside their aircraft programs.
The growth of GCAP and other European defense programs comes amid broader debate over how much Europe should depend on U.S. military equipment.
But Hinds rejected the idea that allies developing indigenous aircraft and autonomous systems necessarily signals a move away from American equipment.
“No, I don’t,” he said when asked whether allies were moving away from U.S. systems.
Instead, Hinds characterized the trend as an expansion of the transatlantic defense-industrial base.
Sweden was one example he cited. The country, which recently joined NATO, continues to produce new military equipment, including Gripen fighters, while those aircraft are already being operated by NATO members.
Swedish Gripens are currently leased to Hungary, and other countries are considering the aircraft, Hinds said.
The broader trend toward co-manufacturing and co-production is also something he welcomed.
“I’m seeing a lot of discussions about co-manufacturing and co-production, and I welcome those discussions as well,” Hinds said.
That approach could become increasingly important as NATO tries to expand its available combat power without relying exclusively on additional U.S.-built platforms.
For USAFE, the objective is to ensure that whatever aircraft NATO countries develop or purchase can plug into a common architecture, sharing data, receiving targeting information, drawing on common logistics networks, and contributing weapons effects across national boundaries.
For a U.S. Air Force command that has spent decades trying to cover Europe with far fewer fighters than it once had, hundreds of autonomous wingmen, whether American-built or allied, could provide a significant way to generate additional combat mass.
Senior U.S. Air Force officials are now working to ensure that the networking, weapons integration, logistics, and command-and-control architecture will be in place once those aircraft start to come online.
Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com
