Air Force accelerates semi-autonomous airpower with multi-vendor CCA contracts

The Air Force advanced the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program by awarding Increment 1 hardware contracts to General Atomics, FQ-42, and Anduril (FQ-44) and establishing a six-vendor baseline for mission autonomy software (Anduril, General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX Collins Aerospace, Shield AI), with production options to speed fielding. The effort emphasizes decoupling hardware and software via the Autonomy Government Reference Architecture (A-GRA) and a competitive, ongoing software market, aiming to field about 1,000 CCA by decade’s end and to select a primary software provider by summer 2027.