Dear Fellow Historical Site Spelunkers,
One highlight of my summer was combining an aerospace “ah-ha!” moment while crossing off a travel bucket list item. My pal Vago Muradian and I visited the Maginot Line after Le Bourget. I’d been fascinated by the elaborate network of forts and fortifications since I was a kid but had never visited history’s greatest linear military metaphor (okay, second greatest if you’re a Great Wall of China fan). Here we are, standing in a casemate next to a 47 mm gun. My “a-ha!” had little to do with the Maginot Line itself; it relates to today’s weapons development.
I was talking about inter-war French military strategy with our tour guide, another slightly obsessed historian named Richard (Tucker; very highly recommended; details here) and I observed that if the billions of francs spent on all these forts had instead been spent on mobile and flexible systems then France might have had a better chance in 1940. Other Richard disagreed, in part because much of the Maginot investments were in the late 1920s and early 1930s; if the French military had bulked up on 1930-vintage aircraft and tanks and other weapons, instead of creating the Maginot Line, then those systems would all have been largely obsolete ten years later.
He’s right, of course. Anyone looking at tanks and planes from the interwar years knows that there was a remarkably steep maturation curve between 1930 and 1945 (fun summer read: The Rise and Fall of the French Air Force: French Air Operations and Strategy, 1900-1940, by Greg Baughen). There were huge advances in all the building blocks, particularly engines and materials. But today, things are different. The three most common US military helicopters and two of the three most common USAF fighters were designed 50+ years ago, and the most common US bomber over 70 years ago. Lots of new technology has been inserted into these platforms, but their shapes and design concepts remain the same.
That’s the way it’s been my entire professional life, and yours too, dear reader, unless your professional life goes back to the 1960s. But things are changing. Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCAs) are now viewed as (a) The future of air combat; (b) A way for countries to attain a higher level of air power sovereignty; (c) an enormous new growth market for legacy and emerging platform primes; (d) an enormous new growth market for supplier companies, who need to develop new, often bespoke systems.
The last two of these were on full display at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference this month. The exhibits were dominated by new CCA engines, new CCA software, CCAs themselves, and whatever else. This is where my summer travel a-ha kicked in. While I’m a believer in the promise of CCAs, taking history into account, I’d offer nine observations:
1. We don’t know about timing. If you ask me and my peers, it’s hardly conceivable that CCAs wouldn’t be a big part of air warfare in 2040. But if you asked me most of my peers in 2010, we would have thought it unlikely that UCAVs wouldn’t be a significant part of air warfare in 2025 (with a few caveats), yet here we are. Again, I’m a CCA believer, but there are myriad variables determining CCA timing and utility.
2. We don’t know how CCAs will change as the concept matures. Deployment modes, AI-driven mission autonomy software, doctrine, controlling platforms, and other variables will impact their evolution. Will they need to perform like fighters, or merely be adjunct weapons carriers? Designs, and costs, will likely change as the concept evolves.
3. We don’t know what onboard and offboard technologies are needed. As a consequence of #2, subsystems and software needs could change radically. Those CCA engines recently introduced are all at the low end of the spectrum; thrust requirements could easily be greater, again depending on range requirements, speed, and other performance parameters. Will they need aerial refueling?
4. As a consequence of #1, #2 and #3, the production ramp might disappoint. USAF wants about 1,000 procured relatively quickly. But buying CCAs in bulk before we know their optimal form would be like France buying hundreds of 1930-vintage fighters. Both would be rendered obsolete a few years later when optimized and matured model emerged. Similarly, while I genuinely believe that CCAs will be hugely important in 2040, there are big differences between buying hundreds per year starting in 2030 and buying hundreds per year starting in 2036.
5. As a consequence of #4, new-start CCA-focused companies might be disappointed too.
6. As new CCA models are introduced, what happens to the large relatively young fleet of older model CCAs? Improved software won’t compensate for any hardware inadequacies. If they aren’t just scrapped, how will the services pay for upgrades and maintenance? My colleague Jeremiah Gertler notes that “the planned acquisition budgets are running far ahead of any increase in sustainment spending.” Even if these sustainment costs are lighter than typical aircraft (since they aren’t flown very often), “if they are just stockpiled like missiles, will the services just leave them on the shelf, as a sunk cost?”
7. The whole speed to deploy “problem” might be overstated. Fighting bureaucracy and creating fast paths to deployment might be a good idea for artillery shells or quadcopters. But for something more complex, technologically ambitious and evolving like CCAs, it might make sense for requirements to be carefully thought through, even if it takes longer.
8. Alternatively, the biggest enemy of The Best could be The Good Enough. One possible future: the first available models, particularly Boeing’s Ghost Bat and Kratos’s Valkyrie, make it to market first, and the newer, more optimized models just keep getting revised, replaced, and pushed out. This would be the opposite of that French interwar procurement lesson (and the opposite of my a-ha moment).
9. This is the worst possible moment for DoD to wall itself off from analysis. In recent months, DoD has moved to cut off media oversight and worse still, all contact with many think tanks and academic institutions. If DoD wants a faster ramp of new technology systems with use cases, design parameters, and technology baselines all in flux, this isolationism from the outside world is incredibly ill-advised, particularly if DoD also continues to gut its internal analysis capabilities.
Yours, ‘Til I Move To A Casemate Condominium With No Internet Connection,
Richard Aboulafia