U.S. Marine Corps Unveils Vision For CCA Integration

The U.S. Marine Corps’ specialized mission led its aviation branch to invest decades ago in fighters that take off and land like helicopters—and helicopters that cruise like fixed-wing aircraft. So it is little surprise that the branch that championed jump jets and tiltrotors plans to set a distinct course for future autonomous systems in its tactical air portfolio.

As the Marine Corps’ contract award for a first tranche of Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) looms this year, officials say their requirements are very different from other services’ design strategies, which have focused on the counter-air mission.

• Marine Collaborative Combat Aircraft  will be optimized for assault support
• Autonomous systems aim to address F-35 capacity shortfall

“We are not an air dominance service,” Col. Derek Brannon, a director in the Cunningham Group, an internal Marine Corps aviation think tank, said at the Modern Day Marine exhibition in Washington April 30. “The Air Force and the Navy view this as very much an air dominance capability, but the attributes we put in ours, and we continue to analyze, are meant to be additive and complementary to the joint force.”

A corollary to the maxim that every Marine is a rifleman is that all Marine Corps aircraft are optimized to support ground troops. In the context of CCA, that means the Marines expect the autonomous systems to prioritize targets on the ground versus those in the air. Brannon envisions his service’s CCA flying ahead of an air assault package of Bell Boeing MV-22 Ospreys escorted by Bell AH-1Z gunships, suppressing or destroying enemy air defenses and striking ground targets before the crewed aircraft arrive on scene.

The CCA are to supplement a limited supply of stealthy, human-piloted, short-takeoff-and-vertical-landing Lockheed Martin F-35B fighters. The strategy depends on making connectivity with the CCA inventory ubiquitous across all Marine Corps systems.

“If we get the digital interoperability piece right, you can have an assault flight lead flying an entire assault package into a hot [landing zone] in a contested environment controlling CCA or managing the capabilities that are airborne and not having to rely on manned [tactical air (TacAir)], which we just don’t have the capacity to support [on every combat mission],” Brannon said.

During his remarks, Brannon presented a slide showing the Project Eagle road map, the Marine Corps’ aviation blueprint through the early 2040s. The plan includes F-35Bs and F-35Cs flying alongside autonomous aircraft, with the flying partners split into two development tracks.

On the first track, the Marines intend to award a contract this year to develop their first batch of CCA. Building on a series of flight demonstrations with two Kratos XQ-58 Valkyries, the prototypes are expected to evolve into the first increment of the Marine Air-Ground Task Force Unmanned Expeditionary Tactical Air (MUX TacAir) fleet by the early 2030s, with the second and third increments following in roughly five-year intervals through the early 2040s.

The second track envisions building on the Marines’ burgeoning, land-based fleet of MUX Medium-Altitude Long-Endurance (MUX MALE) aircraft, the General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. MQ-9A Reaper. By around 2037-38, the service plans to start developing the MQ-Next, a replacement with qualities that have not been divulged.

In combination, this newly unveiled family of systems is to replace the original ship-based MUX program. As recently as five years ago, the Marine Corps had planned to introduce the MUX fleet before the end of this decade. But requirements creep doomed the acquisition before it began, leading to designs like the Bell 247, a tiltrotor with a maximum gross weight that soared beyond 30,000 lb. to accommodate the range and capability requirements set by the MUX program before the program was canceled.

The family-of-systems approach assigns the strike and combat support role to the MUX TacAir fleet and the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance functions to the MUX MALE inventory. But the Project Eagle road map could change. Marine Corps aviation leaders acknowledge that CCA capabilities are poorly understood.

“We still have a lot to learn simply to get this thing airborne, flying and executing next to an F-35 and not hitting each other,” Brannon said. “Let’s get this thing out there. Let’s start integrating. Let’s then start working out the warfighting functions of our CCA and move forward.”