In U.S. defence procurement, hitting your cost target is newsworthy. Beating it significantly is almost unheard of. Yet that is exactly what Air Force officials are claiming about the Collaborative Combat Aircraft programme — the effort to build autonomous drone wingmen that can fly alongside crewed fighters into the most dangerous airspace on earth.
“Not only have we met the goal,” said Col. Timothy Helfrich, the programme’s acquisition executive, “we are doing much better than that.” The original target, set by former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, was to produce CCA drones at roughly one-third the cost of an F-35. That figure implied a unit price somewhere in the range of $25–30 million. What the Air Force is actually seeing is considerably lower.
Why “Cheaper Than Expected” Is Actually a Big Deal
Modern fighter programmes are notorious for cost overruns. The F-35 famously ballooned to over $400 billion in total programme costs. The B-21 Raider, the Air Force’s new stealth bomber, has also seen cost growth. Against that backdrop, a programme that is actively beating its cost goals — and doing so in the early stages of development, before the notoriously expensive production phase — is genuinely unusual.
The reason, officials say, lies in how the CCA was designed from the start. Unlike crewed aircraft, which must meet stringent survivability standards for the human pilot inside, CCAs are designed to be attritable — meaning they can be lost in combat and replaced without catastrophic strategic cost. This simplifies the design, reduces material requirements, and removes the need for ejection seats, life support systems, and the reinforced cockpit structures that add significant weight and cost to crewed aircraft.
What Happens in 2026
This year, the Air Force is continuing flight tests of two competing prototypes — the YFQ-42A and YFQ-44A — while preparing to award further design work for a second increment of the programme to a broader pool of industry competitors. The goal is to eventually purchase CCAs in the hundreds, potentially transforming the ratio of crewed to uncrewed aircraft in the Air Force’s fighter fleet.
There is still a significant challenge ahead: convincing Congress that the Air Force has solid plans for basing, logistics, and sustaining hundreds of large autonomous aircraft. Senators and representatives who saw the F-35 programme spiral in cost are understandably sceptical of early optimism. The Air Force will need to keep demonstrating not just that CCAs are cheap to build — but that they are cheap to operate, maintain, and replace at scale.
The Bigger Picture
If the cost numbers hold, the implications are profound. An air force that can field two, three, or four autonomous wingmen for every crewed fighter — at a price the Pentagon can actually sustain — would look fundamentally different from anything that exists today. Adversaries planning against U.S. air power would face not just highly trained pilots in advanced jets, but swarms of expendable, intelligent machines that can absorb losses and keep fighting.
The era of the single-pilot, single-aircraft dogfighter may be giving way to something far more complex — and, for the first time in a long while, far cheaper than expected.
Sources: Air & Space Forces Magazine; CSIS; U.S. Air Force
