Overview
- The Air Force announced Wednesday that it awarded Increment 1 production contracts to General Atomics for the FQ-42 and Anduril for the FQ-44, moving the program from prototype to production.
- Officials set up a six-vendor autonomy software pool and advanced Anduril, Shield AI and RTX Collins into a six-month head‑to‑head phase that will narrow to a single primary provider by summer 2027.
- The service says the awards came months early because both designs met mission requirements and that production will begin once FY2027 procurement funds are appropriated.
- Air Force leaders are targeting more than 150 combat-capable CCAs by the end of the decade at roughly under $30 million per airframe, backed by a FY2027 request for about $1.4 billion in development and nearly $1 billion in procurement.
- The program uses a government Autonomy Reference Architecture and a licensing model to let software move between platforms, a change meant to speed upgrades and competition while still leaving technical risks on schedule, cost and industrial scale-up to monitor.