The US Air Force's cheap, autonomous successor to the MQ-9 Reaper is supposed to be flying in operational form within two years. Speaking on a panel at the AUSA conference in Washington on 14 October 2026, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said operational prototypes of the Massed Modular Aircraft (MMA) will be fielded in 2028, with large-scale production starting in 2029.

He described the programme in blunt terms: after the autonomous fighters, he said, comes "the autonomous strike platform, the autonomous bomber". For a service that spent two decades flying Reapers from ground stations in Nevada, that is a big change in how it plans to build combat power.

What Meink Said

Meink said the contracts were being awarded now, in collaboration with the Defense Innovation Unit, but he did not name the companies. He put the economics plainly: depending on how the comparison is made, autonomous systems could field combat power five to ten times more cheaply than the alternative.

“We’re going to be fielding operational prototypes by ’28, and we’re just awarding the contract now”

Troy Meink — US Secretary of the Air Force, AUSA conference, 14 October 2026

He also pointed to how fast the first of these machines had moved. Autonomous fighters, a reference to the Collaborative Combat Aircraft, are already in production and being integrated into experimental operations units at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada. The first, he said, took two years to build. He added a caveat: the MMA plan depends heavily on money from Congress, where the fiscal 2027 defense budget is stalled.

A Reaper Replacement Built to Be Cheap

According to Air & Space Forces Magazine, the MMA is meant to do what the MQ-9 does, strike and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, but autonomously and with an open architecture that makes it easy to swap sensors and weapons. It is deliberately less sophisticated than a CCA. The magazine reports a target cost of about $10 million for the base aircraft, half the CCA target, a likely turboprop engine, and a range of around 4,000 miles, roughly twice that of a CCA. It is designed to be slower than a CCA but to fly farther and carry more.

Sources told the magazine that seven companies remain in contention: Anduril, Chaos Industries, General Atomics, Grid Aero, Otto Aerospace, Shield AI and Swarm Aero. The Air Force declined to confirm the list.

Por qué es importante

The Reaper made remote warfare routine, but it is expensive and has proved easy to shoot down when an opponent has real air defences. The MMA bets on numbers instead of survivability: hundreds of cheaper aircraft that the Air Force can afford to lose. Whether 2028 holds will depend first on Congress, and then on whether "large-scale production" means what it says.

Aviation Week looks at Massed Modular Aircraft concepts shown at the AFA conference.

Sources: Air & Space Forces Magazine; AUSA 2026 panel remarks by Secretary Troy Meink; Aviation Week