Project Mosquito / Lightweight Affordable Novel Combat Aircraft (LANCA)

[SW1]

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.u ... rategy.pdf

RAFs new drone strategy document

[SD67]

Really good document, thanks for posting.

Interesting, the graphic is cross-domain - Land Sea Air, specifically mentions carrier strike and ASW. Surely this should all be joint, or at least RN + RAF

[Ron5]

Clear as mud.

[Ron5]

This I understood:

UK RAF Seeking More Advanced Autonomous Collaborative Platforms
Tony Osborne March 27, 2024

LONDON–The UK Royal Air Force (RAF) is hoping to field an attritable autonomous collaborative platform (ACP) to operate and provide mass to its combat aircraft fleets by 2030, the service’s new strategy has outlined.

The service has already developed and advanced disposable systems–defined as Tier 1 ACPs–for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, electronic warfare or acting as decoys, and it plans to declare such a capability operational as early as next year.

But now commanders also want to spool up efforts to bring more advanced autonomous capabilities–referred to by UK officials as Tier 2 platforms. These are defined as larger, capable attritable systems–like those being developed in the U.S. for the Collaborative Combat Air (CCA) program–to support its front-line crewed combat air fleets.

“It is our expectation that ACPs will be an integral part of the [RAF] force structure in 2030,” Air Chief Marshall Richard Knighton, the chief of staff of the RAF, told the Royal United Service Institute’s Combat Air Conference here on March 27 as he launched the service’s Autonomous Collaborative Platform Strategy document.

Knighton said such systems would “work in partnership” with crewed platforms to enhance their lethality and survivability.

As previously reported by Aviation Week, the UK’s ACP development efforts have been informed by the Alvina series of trials around drone swarming, the Lightweight Affordable Novel Combat Aircraft, and the associated Mosquito ACP demonstrator. Development was cut short in 2022 after officers concluded that such a platform would not meet cost-benefit requirements.

Current funding supports the introduction of a Tier 1 capability next year, Knighton told delegates. But introducing Tier 2 capabilities will likely need to be decided in a future Integrated Defense and Security Review. This is likely to be conducted by a new government as the UK faces a general election some time before January 2025.

Prior to the Tier 2 platform’s introduction, the service will need to ask itself a series of “dull questions,” Knighton said, around production, securing supply chains, and being able to quickly adapt the technology to keep the systems relevant. There are also questions about who will operate them, who will launch them and if they need to be part of traditional squadrons, particularly as they may only be used a handful of times during their operational life.

“To deliver the pace of change needed for operational relevance in the future, we’ll need to do less testing, lower standards, performance and quality,” Knighton said.

“By nature, high-risk operations carry higher risks, but mission success is more vital in those kind of operations ... we must be prepared for higher levels of operational risk to achieve that mission success,” he said.

To deliver the capability, the strategy—like the UK defense ministry’s drone strategy published in February—calls for closer cooperation with industry and to benefit from competition.

“We want to build an ecosystem necessary to drive innovation and capacity,” Knighton said. But in alignment with the earlier drone strategy, the architectures of the platforms will need to be open, and the lead system integrators will need to be “onshore,” he added, so that the systems can be rapidly adapted.

“It is clear that ACP could play a critical part of enhancing mass and survivability,” Knighton said. But he warned “it will require changes to our organization, our culture and other industrial relations.”