A 2024 paper from the Mitchell Institute which itself references various games/simulations from 2023 and earlier. The paper in question:
Chinese UCAV/CCA/flying wing drones (ISR, A2A, A2G) thread
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A 2024 paper from the Mitchell Institute which itself references various games/simulations from 2023 and earlier. The paper in question:
Appreciate your information. Though, just for note - The main point of my post is regarding what Adorable Whale and Otter have mentioned about the Chinese counterparts to the CCAs.
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I don't get why people keep writing something like building tons of drones in order to counter China's numerical advantages. They do realize that China is by far the biggest producers of drones, and that it would only make sense that China is going to have vast advantages in drone and anti-drone warfare, right? It's utterly insane to think that you'd be able to outproduce the world's only drone superpower!
Also, do Western thinkers know that Chinese planners read all Western military white papers and that they even try to implement the things that those white papers describe? And yet, these ideas are treated as secret weapons that China would have no way of countering.
Drones in the CCA context typically refers to large unmanned fighters, not the small electric quadcopters you seem to be thinking of. The former is more or less a level playing field with nobody having any in service—though that may soon change, as referenced by Whale/Otter—unlike the latter.
For the Americans, it's the same problem. While China's lead in small drones is more obvious, its lead in larger drones is probably equally strong. A lot of these advantages come from China finding more commercial applications for the larger units, but the biggest difference is that China simply iterates much faster than anyone else can. Where the US might implement a new generation of drones in a 10-15 year timespan, China is going to be doing the same thing in 3-4 years.
And many of the challenges of command and control, and AI integration are going to handled in similar manners, whether we're talking about small quad drones, or CCAs, or submersible drones. I'd expect China to have sizable leads in all of these and there's no real prospect of the Americans catching up any time soon.
Why would there be commercial application for CCAs. No one needs large stealthy supersonic drones other than the Air force, it'll likely share parts with the fighter fleet. Advanced CCAs are effectively a fighter jet without a pilot, development cycle would still be equally as long unless Chinese CCA are like the US ones with no radar/IWB. I expect CCAs to cycle through a generation every decade or so(ie. completely new airframe etc) rather than 3-4 years since that'll be prohibitively expensive and effectively impossible.
The most important parts of the CCA aren't going to be the airframe itself; it's going to be the autonomous functions and the command and control. And it's these technololgies where China has its biggest advantages as they're used all the time in commercial applications there. Chinese companies iterate constantly in these technologies.
You're ideally going to want to use a two seater fighter so that one pilot can dedicate his time to control the CCAs. You'd want this plane to be a 5th gen to improve survivability, but do the Americans have anything like this? On the flip side, the J-20S is basically designed to perform exactly this function, and it's already flying.
USAF did a study where they found a single pilot could control up to 6 drones, J-20S isn't for typical CCA work but for controlling large drone formations. Ideally normal J-20As/MLU'd J-20s/J-35A should all be capable of operating with CCAs with J-20S acting as a flying command post before J-36 comes online.
Perhaps he was referring to something like the WZ-XX/Malan-X or even the GJ-11, these systems serving as part of the CCA in coordination with sixth-generation aircraft.