Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown said the service branch intends to commit more funding in future budgets to the use of unmanned aircraft that will fly alongside with crewed platforms, Breaking Defense reported Monday.
“We’re getting down the path to to have much more capability for uncrewed aircraft,” Brown said at an event Monday.
“I think you’ll you’ll see as we start looking at our future budgets and the analysis we’re doing as part of the operational imperatives that we are committed to more uncrewed capability,” he added.
USAF’s Next Generation Air Dominance program includes the development of a Collaborative Combat Aircraft or a set of semi-autonomous drones that would fly with a sixth-generation fighter aircraft.
Brown noted that the service intends to have the Collaborative Combat Aircraft fly alongside F-35 and other fifth-generation fighter jets.
“As we look into our future budgets, there’s three aspects of this. There’s the platform itself, there’s the autonomy that goes with it, and then there’s how we organize, train and equip to build the organizations,” Brown said. “And we’re trying to do all those in parallel.”
He also offered updates on the Department of Defense’s progress in implementing the Joint All-Domain Command and Control concept.
