An Out of the Box Loyal Wingman Option
The United States Air Force is debating its future and how best to increase the size of its fighter fleet.
Fifty years ago, the first F-16 accidentally took off after a near mishap on a long, stark runway in the middle of the California desert. The “Viper”, as it would come to be called, was designed and built to fly high, turn fast, and shoot down Russian fighters within visual range. The jet was the antidote to the American interceptor aircraft that came before it; a class of aircraft designed to fly high, fast, and in a near straight line to intercept Soviet bombers over the North Pole.
The United States Air Force is debating its future and how best to increase the size of its fighter fleet with a mixture of high-end aircraft, purpose-built to penetrate enemy air defenses and carry a pilot deep behind the forward line of troops, and lower-cost aircraft that could withstand high attrition. The Air Force should consider doubling down on a project already in existence, Project Venom, designed to test autonomous, uncrewed F-16 flight, and use it as a first-generation combat collaborative aircraft.
This approach would help the U.S. Air Force rapidly field an uncrewed combat aircraft, capable of operating alongside modern fighters from bases already in existence, with logistics and weapons ready-made to support them. This project should work in tandem with the push to develop smaller “loyal wingmen,” which are uncrewed aircraft that would be tethered to American and allied fighters to fly out in front of aircrews, detect threats, potentially engage, and absorb any inbound missiles.
The proposed jets, dubbed CCA for short, all look roughly the same: They are small, able to fly at high subsonic speeds, and designed to be stealthy. This common design suggests that the requirements for these prototypes strive for a survivable platform, capable of evading detection by enemy sensors. The challenge with this design, however, is that their size limits the weapons they can carry and the range they can fly. The range issue is particularly important in the Indo-Pacific theater of operations, where distances are large, and required support aircraft, like tankers, are already stretched thin.
This poses a broader challenge to consider. A truly survivable and high-performing “loyal wingman” may have to be as large and complex as a modern fighter. Rather than build an entirely new system from scratch, an uncrewed F-16, purposefully redesigned and built to have common parts with its manned cousins would make an ideal, first-generation unmanned system. They also can be sustained from infrastructure already built from air bases around the world that now support the F-16. The F-16’s manufacturing infrastructure is already in place. The jet also has a combat range that could be extended if life support systems were removed; a sensor suite that is already compatible with the latest U.S. and European fighters; and a track record that would make it comparatively easier to absorb by the U.S. Air Force than a newly designed airframe.
The F-16 is, without question, the world’s most successful fighter. It is still in use, with its latest variant now being produced at a purpose-built production line in South Carolina to help service continued foreign interest. It is the backbone of many of the world’s air forces, including the United States, and will continue to fly for at least the next quarter century – a full seventy-five years after it was first built.
The jet’s long time in service, along with its now ubiquitous engine, means there are ample sources for spare parts in the United States, and the cost of flying and servicing the jet is affordable. The F-16 can also carry basically every weapon in the U.S. inventory, from long-range cruise missiles to guided bombs to air-to-air missiles. It has also flown hundreds of hours uncrewed, albeit with the intent of getting shot down.
The United States should work with industry to build a rapid uncrewed F-16 prototype, based on the latest Block 70 variant, make appropriate updates to the data link needed to tether the jet to the F-35, and test the manned-unmanned concept. This approach would follow in the footsteps of the QF-16 effort, which has turned legacy jets into unmanned target drones to test US missiles. This approach would allow the United States to rapidly produce an unmanned wingman from a proven airframe, already certified to carry the weapons and sensors it would be using, and see how it performs when tested.
A crewed Block 70, from a large block buy, can cost between $60-70 million per airframe. This is twice as much as the Air Force would like to pay for its future loyal wingman aircraft. However, the advantage of this approach is that the infrastructure to build the jets is already in place, saving time and money on other aspects of a fighter development program.
An optionally manned F-16 also has other benefits. It would force an enemy to allocate a missile to every single incoming aircraft because they would not know if it is a fully manned platform or the autonomous loyal wingman. In contrast, the current CCA prototypes look different from the F-16, which could help an enemy track and sort incoming US aircraft for targeting.
There are, of course, drawbacks to this proposal. The consolidation of the fighter industry has contributed to atrophy in the United States’ defense industrial base. This approach would further consolidate the manufacturing of US fighters, undercutting efforts to use the loyal wingmen project to find new aircraft suppliers. However, it is important to think about how to use these unmanned aircraft. A small loyal wingman, similar to the designs now being offered, could be used in areas where distance is less a factor – as is the case in Europe – or eventually be integrated into a mix of manned F-35, unmanned F-16, and a future smaller unmanned aircraft that could augment sensor capabilities for both of its larger cousins (I will discuss this in a future post).
The future requires new and creative thinking and the eventual adoption of the smaller prototype unmanned combat aircraft now being developed. However, if the Air Force would like to test a concept quickly, using an off-the-shelf solution (with appropriate tweaks), the F-16 is an option to consider. This type of iterative, innovative approach leverages proven technology, with a mandate for open software mission computers to allow for rapid innovation, and using them in new and innovative ways. The F-16 has dominated skies for decades, there is no reason it cannot continue in ways that its designers – the eccentric and brilliant John Boyd, along with his “fighter mafia” – never imagined.
Aaron Stein is the president of the Foreign Policy Research Institute