An Update on Collaborative Combat Aircraft: January 2026
Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) have moved in just a few years from a conceptual “loyal wingman” idea to concrete flight testing, down‑selects, and multi‑service adoption, with 2025–2026 shaping up as the period where the United States proves whether it can actually field affordable combat mass at speed. Across the Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and now the Army, CCAs are evolving into a family of large, jet‑powered uncrewed systems, tightly linked to manned platforms and backed by a growing budget, a more incremental acquisition strategy, and intensive experimentation with autonomy and manned‑unmanned teaming.
The U.S. Air Force remains the pacing service in the United States for CCA development, having launched the first formal program in 2023 and moved it into early operational prototyping during 2025. In August 2025, General Atomics’ YFQ‑42A achieved a key milestone with its first flight at a California test location, occurring less than two years after program start and providing data on airworthiness, flight autonomy, and mission‑system integration. Anduril’s competing YFQ‑44A “Fury” followed with initial flight tests in October 2025, marking a second jet‑powered CCA prototype entering the air and validating the rapid‑prototyping approach that underpins the program.
These prototypes are not being treated as purely experimental demonstrators but as the core of an “operational learning” effort. Both aircraft are undergoing developmental testing in California while also feeding into assessments run through an Experimental Operations Unit at Nellis Air Force Base, designed to link early flight results directly to tactics development and future requirement refinement. The Air Force has also selected Beale Air Force Base as the preferred location for a CCA Aircraft Readiness Unit, signaling a commitment to standing up a real-world support and deployment infrastructure rather than keeping CCA locked inside test ranges.
The Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program has been structured around increments, with Increment 1 focused on delivering a first “minimum viable” capability suited for teaming with NGAD and F‑35 in contested environments. Defense insight assessments indicate that between roughly 100 and 150 Increment 1 CCAs are expected to be procured, with the broader program potentially reaching into the low thousands of airframes as additional increments are launched. Critical design reviews for the initial prototypes concluded in late 2024, and ground testing began in early 2025, aligning with a forecast of prototype flights in 2025 and first operational deliveries toward the end of the decade.
A key shift in recent messaging has been the decision not to treat Increment 2 as a radical leap into an exotic, ultra‑stealthy design, but as an iterative step driven by lessons from Increment 1 flight operations and experimentation. This approach implies a focus on refining survivability, payload options, and cost rather than starting over with an entirely new platform, supporting the broader “affordable mass” concept central to the NGAD family of systems. Congress has taken note of this shift; a Congressional Research Service brief from January 2025 describes CCA as having moved “decisively from concept and experimentation into early operational prototyping,” highlighting emerging oversight questions around autonomy, scale, storage, and sustainment for potentially hundreds of large uncrewed aircraft.
Financially, CCA has become a central pillar of the Air Force’s future combat air budget. In March 2024, Air and Space Forces Magazine reported that the service planned nearly $28.5 billion over five years for the broader NGAD family, with CCA accounting for a significant share of RDT&E and later procurement as it moves toward production. The FY2026 request singled out CCA RDT&E at just over $111 million in discretionary funding in one line, but that figure is nested within larger NGAD‑related efforts and is supplemented by separate funding for autonomy, networking, and related experimentation. More recent reporting notes that CCA‑related requests for FY2026 across accounts are on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars, underscoring an upward trend as prototyping transitions to preparation for production.
The budget trajectory is driven in part by the promise of achieving a step change in numbers at a fraction of the cost of crewed fighters. Open‑source assessments describe a target unit cost for Increment 1 CCAs of roughly $30 million per aircraft, compared with “multiple hundreds of millions” for a sixth‑generation NGAD fighter, allowing planners to envision each crewed aircraft operating alongside several uncrewed teammates. At the same time, CRS has flagged congressional questions about whether the Air Force has adequately planned for storing, transporting, and maintaining such large fleets of big uncrewed aircraft and how it will integrate National Guard and Reserve units and F‑35 squadrons into CCA operations. These oversight issues suggest that the political test for CCA will be less about the technology’s feasibility and more about demonstrating scalable logistics and credible concepts of employment.
Even as airframes move into flight test, autonomy remains the decisive variable for CCAs. The Air Force and its industry partners are working toward large, jet‑powered uncrewed aircraft equipped with AI‑driven software capable of missions ranging from air‑to‑air and air‑to‑ground combat to electronic warfare, targeting, and ISR. Public reporting indicates that mission autonomy software stacks are being developed and integrated somewhat independently of specific airframes, with vendors such as RTX (Raytheon) announced as providing autonomy suites for at least one of the prototypes, though formal selections remain largely undisclosed.
An important doctrinal shift lies in treating CCA as part of an “autonomous collaborative” ecosystem rather than as remotely piloted platforms in the traditional sense. Air Force descriptions highlight CCAs as able to operate as teammates to manned aircraft, as individual autonomous platforms, or as members of swarms without continuous human supervision, with operators setting mission objectives and engagement parameters rather than manually flying each aircraft. This aligns with the Congressional Research Service’s observation that CCAs may be able to adapt to battlefield changes more quickly than human operators, even as lawmakers weigh the risks and ethical implications of increased reliance on autonomy in lethal missions. The near‑term flight profiles being demonstrated—pre‑planned semi‑autonomous routes with push‑button takeoff and landing—are designed to build trust and experience on the way to more sophisticated collaborative tactics.
One of the most significant developments in 2025 was the spread of CCA‑like concepts across the other services. By late 2025, both the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps had launched their own programs aimed at fielding CCA capabilities by around 2030, building on Air Force experience but tailoring designs and concepts of employment to maritime and expeditionary missions. The Navy’s efforts are nested inside its own Next Generation Air Dominance approach, with CCAs envisioned as carrier‑capable or carrier‑compatible uncrewed aircraft working alongside F/A‑18, F‑35C, and future manned platforms, and the service has signaled plans to use exercises with Australia to explore manned‑unmanned teaming in realistic operational contexts.
The Marine Corps, for its part, has taken an incremental approach, awarding an Increment 1 contract to a Northrop–Kratos team to begin developing an expeditionary CCA and emphasizing a stepwise build‑up of capabilities in command and control, electronic warfare, mission computing, and datalinks. Budget documents and public statements frame each minimum viable increment as a tool for real training and tactics development with operational units rather than a purely lab‑based technology experiment. This approach mirrors the Air Force’s “learning while fielding” strategy and reflects a broader institutional recognition that only operational forces, not test organizations alone, can validate how CCAs should be used in complex, distributed operations.
By late 2025, the U.S. Army had also publicly confirmed that it is pursuing a CCA‑like capability, making it the last of the four services to formally move toward manned‑unmanned teaming in a structured way. Rather than immediately launching a full program of record, Army aviation leadership has used 2025 to study Air Force and Navy efforts and conduct its own experiments, looking at how a CCA concept might support land‑centric operations and Future Vertical Lift platforms. Brig. Gen. Cain Baker, who leads the Army’s Future Vertical Lift Cross Functional Team, indicated that the service is targeting an initial capability within “the next couple of years,” contingent on continued experimentation and refined requirements.
The Army has been testing relevant technologies in its annual aviation experimentation events and through market‑outreach activities assessing industry offerings in the Group 4 and Group 5 unmanned aircraft space. This more cautious and iterative posture reflects both the Army’s distinct operational needs and a desire to avoid locking in requirements before the service fully understands how CCAs should interact with helicopters, long‑range fires, and distributed ground formations. In practice, the Army’s move signals that CCA‑style systems are becoming a joint expectation rather than a niche Air Force project.
Taken together, these developments suggest that the CCA concept has passed its initial credibility test and is now entering a decisive phase where the key questions shift from “can it be built?” to “can it be fielded at scale and integrated into real operations?”. For the Air Force, 2026 will be about continuing flight tests of the YFQ‑42A and YFQ‑44A, awarding further design work for Increment 2 to a broader pool of industry participants, and convincing Congress that logistics, basing, and sustainment plans are robust enough to support hundreds of large uncrewed aircraft. Across the Navy, Marine Corps, and Army, 2026 will test whether their emerging programs can convert paper roadmaps into executable increments that produce usable capabilities for frontline units rather than endlessly deferred science projects.
At the operational level, CCAs are central to restoring mass and resilience to U.S. combat air power in the face of sophisticated Chinese and Russian air defenses. The combination of relatively lower unit cost, modular payloads, and AI‑enabled autonomy promises to extend the reach, sensing, and striking power of a shrinking fleet of manned aircraft, provided the services can solve the challenges of command and control, data links, and cross‑domain integration. The next two to three years, therefore, will not simply determine the fate of a single program; they will indicate whether the U.S. can establish a repeatable pattern for rapidly fielding autonomous collaborative platforms across domains, turning CCA from a promising prototype into a durable pillar of future force design.