Every December, C-130Js from Yokota fly to Guam and spend a fortnight pushing bundles out of the back over the Federated States of Micronesia. Operation Christmas Drop has run for seventy-four years and reaches sixty islands. It is charming, and it is also a rehearsal.

Those same islands are where the U.S. Air Force expects to have to deliver ammunition, fuel and water if a Pacific war starts, into airstrips that may be under fire, using aircraft with people aboard.

The Chief of Staff of the Air Force was asked this week whether some of those aircraft should stop having people aboard. His answer was a qualified yes.

The Problem Nobody Solved

Agile Combat Employment is the Air Force’s answer to the fact that large bases are now easy to hit. Spread the aircraft across many small airfields and no single missile salvo achieves much.

It is a good answer that creates a worse problem. Twenty dispersed sites need twenty supply chains, and every one of those runs through an aircraft flying a predictable route into a location the adversary also knows about. A C-130 carrying pallets of 30mm ammunition to a coral strip is a large, slow, valuable target with five people in it.

Which is why the question Shephard put to Gen. Wilsbach at AFA was a pointed one: does the Air Force want uncrewed aircraft, rotary and fixed-wing, to haul cargo into places like the Western Pacific and Africa?

That is the entire official position, and it is more interesting than it sounds.

“What’s Available” Turns Out to Be Quite a Lot

The Air Force does not have a cargo drone programme. Industry has spent the last two years building cargo drones anyway, on the assumption that one is coming.

Textron and Merlin have taken the pilots out of the Cessna SkyCourier, producing a version that carries 2.7 tonnes into unpaved strips without a crew. Archer and Anduril unveiled Halo, a pilotless cargo aircraft, at Farnborough. Anduril’s Thunder, a Group 5 autonomous tiltrotor built with Archer, lists contested cargo and logistics among its missions. Zuri has shown an uncrewed cargo tiltrotor. Kaman’s KARGO, contracted by the Army in 2023 to move more than 800 lb over 100 miles and since acquired by Piasecki, has been flying for a while.

Anduril’s Thunder, an autonomous tiltrotor whose advertised mission set includes contested cargo and logistics.

So when the Chief of Staff says the service is looking at demonstrators to see what is available, he is describing a genuinely unusual situation. Normally the Air Force writes a requirement and industry builds to it. Here industry has built first and is waiting to find out whether anybody wants it.

Why No Programme of Record Yet

The absence is not an oversight. A programme of record means committed money across years, and money for airlift competes with money for fighters, bombers, tankers and now several hundred collaborative combat aircraft.

There is also a doctrinal question nobody has settled. A cargo drone that carries 800 lb is a useful runner between dispersed sites. A cargo drone that carries 2.7 tonnes starts to replace a real airlifter and raises awkward questions about what the crewed fleet is for. The Air Force has not decided which of those it is buying, which is a reasonable thing to still be thinking about.

Meanwhile the requirement is not theoretical. U.S. Africa Command has airlift needs that nobody is enthusiastic about meeting with crewed aircraft, and the Pacific problem gets harder every year.

Seventy-four Decembers of dropping bundles on Micronesian atolls have taught the Air Force exactly how hard it is to supply small islands across an ocean. The open question is whether the next aircraft that does it will have anybody on the ramp to watch.

Sources: Shephard Media; U.S. Air Force; Textron Aviation; Anduril; Piasecki Aircraft