Who Controls the Air Force’s CCA Fighters Under AUTOWARCOM?

The Pentagon wants a four-star autonomous warfare command by October 2027. The Air Force already has FQ-42 and FQ-44 aircraft in production. No public order found yet says who ends up controlling them.

The Pentagon is targeting Oct. 1, 2027, for a four-star Autonomous Warfare Command, but no public order found through Nov. 2 says who will control the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the plan Sept. 30 at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia. Pentagon News described the mission of the command, known as AUTOWARCOM, as developing autonomous and robotic capabilities across the joint force.

The Air Force, meanwhile, is already building its uncrewed CCA fleet. The FQ-42 Vengeance and FQ-44 Fury entered production in June with an initial 150 aircraft. The service’s goals are at least 500 combat-ready semi-autonomous systems by 2032 and 1,000 aircraft overall.

An autonomous-warfare mission does not by itself move those aircraft under AUTOWARCOM. Operational command, acquisition, force development and software oversight are separate questions. The public record does not show whether they would stay with the Air Force, shift to the new command or be divided.

This report draws on official Air Force and Pentagon accounts, company releases, federal law, think tank analysis and defense trade reporting.

Earlier Drone Portfolio Left CCA Out

Breaking Defense reported July 1 that a memorandum creating the Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager for Unmanned Systems, or DRPM-UxS, placed CCA outside its small-aircraft portfolio. That earlier decision came before the AUTOWARCOM announcement and does not guarantee the aircraft will stay out of the new command.

Defense One reported Oct. 25 that the Air Force and Navy referred questions about component commands to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. An unnamed Pentagon official told the outlet the services support the command and said the Air Force is “actively exploring organizational structure elements to enable rapid implementation and training of unmanned systems.”

FlightGlobal suggested in a Nov. 2 analysis that Air Combat Command and frontline fighter squadrons would keep operational control in combat. It also attributed to the Pentagon a statement that the services would keep their roles in force development, program execution, readiness and service integration. Neither point has been independently confirmed.

The same report attributed the description of CCAs as autonomous fighters to Hegseth, which also could not be confirmed. A Pentagon News account of an Oct. 14 event uses that term in summarizing remarks by Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink.

No statement on a CCA transfer from General Atomics appeared in its September and October releases reviewed through Nov. 2, and none from Anduril appeared in the Air Force procurement releases reviewed.

Hegseth Cites Service Support as Analysts Raise Limits

Hegseth has presented the initiative as a way to integrate efforts across the services and said they support the idea. Defense One reported that he also said the command would become the Pentagon’s official purchaser of autonomous technology.

“These services are not fighting us on that concept; they believe in it,” Hegseth said Oct. 14 at the Association of the United States Army annual meeting in Washington, according to Pentagon News.

Meink stressed affordable, scalable autonomy and described autonomous fighters entering experimental operations units at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada. His published comments did not identify a future operational commander for CCA.

Mark F. Cancian, a senior adviser in the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, sees a tension between centralized buying and integration on one side and the services’ varied operating needs on the other.

“The operational demands and types of drones are so varied that a department-wide organization to operate them would be unworkable,” Cancian wrote in an Oct. 20 analysis.

Cancian also reported that DRPM-UxS is to work with the services on recommendations to the deputy secretary for rebalancing joint investment allocations. That concerns recommendations, not an established transfer of CCA money or operational control.

A separate brief from the center points to software as a central oversight issue. Kateryna Bondar, a senior fellow at its Wadhwani AI Center, and research assistant Matt Mande argued that autonomy oversight should reach the software directing weapons, not stop at the airframe.

“The locus of lethal decisionmaking is not the thing that flies; instead, it is the software that commands it,” they wrote in the June brief. Their paper does not address AUTOWARCOM’s eventual authority over CCA.

Airframes and Software Run on Separate Tracks

The Air Force’s June 17 announcement split the program in two. General Atomics and Anduril received engineering and manufacturing development and production contracts for the FQ-42 and FQ-44, the Increment 1 aircraft. At that time, the service described its goal as more than 150 combat-capable CCA by the end of the decade.

Mission-autonomy software went to a six-vendor pool under a six-year baseline contract vehicle. The vendors are Anduril, General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX Collins Aerospace and Shield AI. Anduril, RTX Collins Aerospace and Shield AI received initial production options.

The Air Force planned to select its primary Increment 1 mission-autonomy provider by summer 2027, shortly before the command’s target date. The service says its government-owned Autonomy Government Reference Architecture separates software from hardware, allowing integration, updates and portability across aircraft.

Manufacturing and testing continue. General Atomics Aeronautical Systems reported that a new FQ-42 reached Creech on Sept. 18 for test and evaluation. On Oct. 23, General Atomics named Spirit Defense, a Boeing company, as an FQ-42 fuselage design-build partner, citing added capacity and resilience.

CCA unit price, range, payload and endurance are not established in the records reviewed.

Deadline and Funding Remain Open

A plan due by Oct. 30 was to lay out command relationships and what forces each service will contribute, Defense News reported. Whether it was submitted, approved or publicly released has not been independently confirmed.

Inside Defense reported that DRPM-UxS Chief Executive Officer Owen West and Navy Senior Chief Max Strasiser published a new Project Agincourt memorandum Oct. 21. Defense One separately referred to an operational roadmap. Neither report establishes that the Oct. 30 requirement was met.

Defense One’s October report said the command depends on a funding bill whose passage is far from assured and that the Pentagon has little of the force structure earlier functional commands could draw on.

Anna Miskelley, a defense industry analyst at Forecast International, wrote in May that the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group’s fiscal 2027 request totaled $54.6 billion, mixing base-budget and prospective reconciliation funding. Defense One later reported that about $54 billion was being sought through reconciliation and that Hegseth has said the money would be used to get the command off the ground.

That money is a request, not a confirmed appropriation, a headquarters cost or a CCA price. The enacted amount is not established, and no verified estimate exists in the records reviewed for what an AUTOWARCOM headquarters would cost to run.

Federal law lets the president, through the defense secretary and with the advice and assistance of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, establish combatant commands and prescribe their force structure. It generally requires congressional notification and a briefing within 60 days, except during hostilities or an imminent threat of hostilities. That authority is distinct from the dedicated manpower, budget and acquisition powers described in Hegseth’s Project Agincourt memo. Defense News reported that those powers require an act of Congress. The statute does not name CCA.

The services are also reorganizing. The Army announced Oct. 2 that an Oct. 1 directive called for a U.S. Army Futures and Autonomous Systems Command, an autonomy acquisition executive and expanded specialist positions.