U.S. Air Force Greenlights Two Robot Fighter Jets

The U.S. Air Force has awarded production contracts to two companies for semi-autonomous fighter-type drones, marking the first time the service will field a split fleet of uncrewed combat aircraft built to genuinely different designs. Anduril Industries won with its FQ-44, derived from the YFQ-44A prototype, and General Atomics won with its FQ-42, developed as the YFQ-42A Dark Merlin. The Air Force wants more than 150 of these Collaborative Combat Aircraft operational by the end of the decade.

What exactly did the Air Force approve?

On June 17, 2026, the Air Force handed production contracts to both Anduril and General Atomics under its Collaborative Combat Aircraft program. The CCA category covers large uncrewed jets built to fighter-class performance standards, capable of carrying weapons and flying combat missions either alongside crewed aircraft or independently using onboard autonomy software. The concept, often called the loyal wingman model, is built around the idea that a single pilot in an F-35 could direct several of these drones at once, putting more weapons and sensors into a fight without putting more pilots at risk.

The Air Force did not disclose contract values or specific order quantities. What it did confirm is the goal of procuring more than 150 combat-capable CCAs before 2030, with the option to order additional lots from either company based on performance, cost, and delivery speed. Keeping two suppliers in competition is a deliberate hedge: if one design underperforms or one manufacturer falls behind, the other remains available.

Why does the speed of this program matter to the robotics and defense industry?

Anduril received its prototype contract in April 2024, began ground testing in April 2025, started flight testing in October 2025, and secured a production contract in June 2026. That is roughly two years from a standing start to a manufacturing award. Traditional crewed fighter programs have routinely taken a decade or more to reach the same milestone.

The Air Force is betting that two competing uncrewed fighter programs can deliver the affordable combat mass that decades of shrinking fleets and rising aircraft costs have steadily eroded.

Anduril attributes the compressed timeline to designing for mass production from the beginning, building manufacturing tooling in parallel with the aircraft rather than treating production as a problem to solve after the design was locked. The company's Arsenal-1 facility near Columbus, Ohio is already producing Fury aircraft, and the production line is built with equipment on wheels so it can be reconfigured as the design evolves or as order volumes grow. That kind of manufacturing flexibility is unusual in defense aviation and reflects practices more common in commercial aerospace or automotive production.

General Atomics brings a different approach. The FQ-42 draws on design work from the XQ-67A Off-Board Sensing Station program, giving the Air Force two distinct engineering philosophies rather than two variants of the same concept. That diversity is intentional: the service is not betting on a single technical approach to autonomous combat flight.

What still has to happen before these aircraft are operational?

The current contracts cover initial production aircraft to support continued testing and validation, not full-scale fleet delivery. Anduril has reported extensive flight testing already, including dozens of sorties from multiple airfields, mid-flight switches between two different autonomy software suites, and integration of inert air-to-air munitions. In one exercise with the Air Force's Experimental Operations Unit, a small crew with only a few days of training launched, recovered, and turned around multiple FQ-44 sorties without the large base infrastructure a conventional fighter squadron requires.

Even so, scaling production while continuing to test and refine two different aircraft simultaneously is the harder phase of the program. A production contract announcement does not resolve questions about software maturity, logistics, maintenance at scale, or how well either aircraft performs in realistic combat scenarios. The Air Force has set an end-of-decade target for operational capability, which leaves roughly three to four years to answer those questions. For the robotics and autonomous systems industry, the program is a concrete signal that the Pentagon is prepared to move faster on autonomous platforms than its historical acquisition pace would suggest, and that new entrants without legacy fighter programs can compete for and win major production awards.