Collaborative Combat Aircraft
This transcript is made possible through the sponsorship of Schneider Electric
Brig. Gen. Jason Voorheis:
All right. Can we all hear me here? All right. Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. Welcome to day two
of AFA, and to our panel Collaborative Combat Aircraft and industry perspective. I am Brigadier General,
Jason Voorheis, the Air Force Program and executive officer for fighters in Advanced Aircraft. As you
may have read in the press, the secretary of the Air Force has announced that the Air Force will field
1000 and likely many more CCA on an aggressive timeline to build affordable mass in capacity into the
current Air Force Force structure. The FY24 president's budget makes a significant investment in the CCA
program of record, which will leverage a consortium of nearly 30 industry partners with expertise in air
vehicles, mission systems, autonomy and software development.
And this CCA industry consortium will continue to expand over time to sustain a vibrant competitive
marketplace with planned competitive on-ramps consisting of both traditional defense industrial-based
vendors and emerging small business and non-traditional vendors. We have with us today three industry
leaders representing companies that will help aggressively drive the CCA market into the future. Our
panelists are Mark Rettig from GE Aerospace, Tom Jones from Northrop Grumman, and David Alexander
from General Atomics. I'd like to start today's discussion by providing each of our distinguished industry
panelists a few minutes to introduce themselves and the companies they represent. Tom, why don't we
start with you?
Tom Jones:
Okay. First of all, thank you very much general for allowing me to participate on the panel with you. CCA
is a phenomenal opportunity and a great program we're very excited about, and I think it's going to be a
really transformational capability for our air force and our country and their defense. As I look at this
program, I think one of the key areas of focus here is speed to ramp. And I look at that in two different
dimensions. One is getting this transformational technology into the hands of the warfighter very early
with initial units allowing them to experiment, understand what the technology is like. And the second,
because Secretary Kendall has been very clear about the fact that we need to keep timeline in mind is
transitioning these capabilities into production to get to our warfighter as fast as possible.
So that implies a couple things to me. We have, if you've heard me talk on the B 21 before, there's a
motto we had on that program, T-one like P-one, it means that we wanted our first test jet or our first
prototype to be as close to production as close to operationally relevant as possible. And I think that
that same mantra plays out in this particular venue. We need to make sure that those first prototypes
we get to our warfighters are operationally relevant, and we need to start with the end in mind, which is
we need to figure out how to make potentially thousands of these aircraft and to do it very efficiently
and quickly. As I think about the problem making it through development, we are one of the leaders in
autonomous aircraft. And I'll confess that earlier in my career, I spent about 20 years in autonomous
underwater vehicles, including a bunch of time chasing those things around the ocean in a boat myself.
Getting autonomy right is not easy. We've got about 400,000 hours of operational autonomy in our
product line. So I think really paying attention to making sure that we get operationally robust
autonomy as a risk that we need to manage. The other, and final point I'd bring in my introduction is I've
been talking a lot about digital engineering. We've seen a lot of the fruits of that play out as we've been
able to eight years in still be holding to key milestones on the B-21 program. And I mentioned this at the
classified panel yesterday that I spoke on B-21, we did all that despite the fact that there was a world
