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

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.

While no vendors have been announced for an Army CCA, Boeing unveiled on Monday its version of the tiltrotor CCA capability to pair with the Army’s helicopter fleet, including the company’s Chinook and Apache aircraft. The new model is called the Collaborative Transformational Rotorcraft, or the CxR, and is in the “conceptual stages,” a company exec told reporters ahead of the unveiling.

“It’ll be a tiltrotor with two proprotors” and a gas turbine engine, Chris Speights, chief engineer of Boeing’s vertical lift portfolio for its defense division, said in a briefing with reporters on Oct. 7 ahead of the AUSA conference. “We believe that that’s going to provide the most mature, rapid ability to field.”

He added that CxR will be either a Group 4 or Group 5 drone.

Though Phillips did not call out Boeing specifically, he said “we received a very robust response from industry,” regarding the responses from last fall, adding that the capability “might not look like some of the things we’ve seen on the floor today” or it could be a “combination of maybe some of the things you’d seen on the floor, but we’re excited to start thinking about that space.” 

Further, Baker said that the service plans to conduct testing for the CCA-like capability during its annaul aviation experiment in the second quarter of this fiscal year.

“We’re looking at vendors potentially to come out and market with us,” Baker said. “That is what we’re really looking at, is what is the state of technology right now to develop a requirement that we can deliver?”