The two U.S. defense contractors will build unmanned Collaborative Combat Aircraft (drone wingmen) for the Air Force, with autonomy software chosen in a separate competition.
The Air Force has signed its first factory orders for a new class of unmanned aircraft, awarding production contracts to Anduril and General Atomics to build what the service calls Collaborative Combat Aircraft, lower-cost "drone wingmen" designed to fly alongside crewed fighters. The awards turn a prototype competition into an actual production line for Increment 1 of the program, according to Defense One.
A Collaborative Combat Aircraft is not a single weapons system but a category: an unmanned companion meant to extend what crewed fighters can do rather than replace them. The Air Force's pitch, as reported by Defense One, is that the aircraft will arrive in numbers, at a price that makes them more expendable in a high-end fight than crewed jets. Col. Timothy Helfrich, the CCA portfolio acquisition executive, has framed the affordability target as roughly one-third the cost of an F-35, a stated goal rather than a confirmed per-aircraft price.
That cost claim is exactly where the program becomes hard to evaluate from the outside. Per-lot contract values and aircraft counts for Increment 1 were not disclosed in the awards Defense One covered, which means the public cannot yet check whether the F-35-cost heuristic is being met in practice. The structure is also more involved than a single buy: Increment 1 covers three production lots, each a separate decision point, and the autonomy software that will actually fly the wingmen is being run as a separate competition.
Six companies — Anduril, General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, Shield AI, Northrop Grumman, and RTX Collins — received a baseline six-year contract vehicle to compete for the autonomy stack. Of those, Anduril, Shield AI, and RTX Collins received additional Air Force production contracts and are actively competing to build the CCA's final autonomous software, with a first review after six months and a final selection expected by Summer 2027. The Air Force plans a "first-of-its-kind" software award tied to warfighter feedback, only paying the full licensing fee when a vendor delivers combat capability aligned with troop needs.
Both Anduril and General Atomics had prototype setbacks worth noting. In April, General Atomics' YFQ-42A Dark Merlin crashed at the company's California airport after an autopilot program error, halting flight testing for a little more than a month. Anduril's YFQ-44A Fury prototype experienced a months-long delay before notching its first flight in late October, the result of the company's push for semi-autonomous software development. The "Y" will be dropped from both companies' aircraft designations to signal the transition from prototype to production.
Northrop Grumman self-financed its own CCA offering and was not selected for Increment 1 production — a notable miss for one of the defense industry's largest primes, though it remains in the six-company autonomy software pool. Nine vendors are competing for Increment 2 of the CCA program, the next iteration of the service's drone wingman ambition.
The open question is whether the production line can deliver the affordability the Air Force is promising while the autonomy software catches up to the airframes already on order. Watch the first Increment 1 lot's eventual price disclosure, the autonomy-software down-select, and any change in how the service describes the human-machine division of labor on the aircraft.