US Air Force Targets at Least 500 Uncrewed Fighters by 2032
The US Air Force has put a number on its uncrewed fighter ambitions, and it is far larger than anything the service has committed to before. Speaking at the Air, Space & Cyber Conference on 14 September, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said the service intends to have at least 500 Collaborative Combat Aircraft in service by 2032. He then added a second figure that had not been expected: 500 aircraft of a cheaper class called MMA by the same year.
“We will have autonomous fighters like the Collaborative Combat Aircraft, or CCA. We intend to have at least 500 of these in service by 2032,” Meink told the audience, adding that the aircraft are already rolling off the assembly line. Pressed during the question period, he was explicit that the figure is a floor rather than a ceiling: “We talk about 500 by 2032, but we could actually build more of them than that.”
Why the number matters
CCA targets have swung wildly over three years. In 2023, then-Secretary Frank Kendall spoke of more than 1,000 uncrewed combat aircraft. By 2025 and early 2026, budget reality had pulled the programme back to an initial batch of 100 to 150. September’s figure reverses that retreat.
The distinction is not cosmetic. A fleet of 150 is an experimental capability bolted onto the crewed force. A fleet of 500 is a separate mass. Chief of Staff General Ken Wilsbach framed it that way at the same conference, saying CCAs “change how we project power and generate mass in highly contested environments.”
Increment 1: two designs, two companies
Two designs are in production under the programme’s first increment. General Atomics builds the FQ-42 Vengeance, previously known as Dark Merlin; Anduril builds the FQ-44 Fury. Their prototypes, the YFQ-42A and YFQ-44A, are in operational testing. The unit cost the Air Force is targeting at full-rate production is roughly $20 million — less than a quarter of what an F-35A costs.
At least one further increment is planned. Lockheed Martin’s tailless Vectis and Northrop Grumman’s FQ-48A Talon are the likely contenders. Whether the 500-aircraft figure covers Increment 2 designs has not been clarified.
MMA: a second mass at half the price
The less-anticipated part of the speech concerned MMA, a programme launched in July 2026 for a modular strike and ISR aircraft at roughly $10 million a copy. The original goal was at least 180 airframes. Meink redefined it as 100 fielded in 2029, rising to 500 by 2032.
The driver is attrition. The MQ-9 Reaper fleet took heavy losses during operations against Iran, and by May 2026 the inventory had fallen to 135 aircraft. An expendable, fast-to-build successor is the direct answer to that. General Atomics’ Wildfire design is among the competitors.
What the concept is actually for
The arithmetic behind CCA is straightforward. Against a modern integrated air defence network, a single crewed fighter can carry only so many weapons and sensors, and losing it is expensive in money and unacceptable in aircrew. Three or four uncrewed aircraft flying alongside an F-22 or F-35 widen the sensor net and complicate the defender’s targeting problem.
The programme was also designed from the ground up around a minimal logistics footprint. Freedom from long runways and heavy maintenance infrastructure is a precondition for the Agile Combat Employment concept the Air Force intends to use across the Indo-Pacific. An Experimental Operations Unit was stood up to develop the tactics, running trials at Edwards Air Force Base in April 2026 and Creech Air Force Base in July.
The alliance picture
A 500-aircraft uncrewed combat fleet would shift the capability balance inside NATO. European equivalents — the remote carrier element of the Franco-German-Spanish FCAS, and the uncrewed adjunct work under the UK-Italy-Japan GCAP — remain well short of series production. If the 2032 date holds, the alliance will carry a visible asymmetry in this class.
Turkey sits in a different part of the same problem. Turkish Aerospace’s ANKA-3 and Baykar’s KIZILELMA pursue a comparable idea — a low-observable uncrewed combat platform working with crewed aircraft — inside a different cost structure and supply chain. What the American figures underline is that competition in this class is settling on unit cost and production rate as much as on technical performance.
The budget side is unresolved. Five hundred CCAs at $20 million each implies a $10 billion procurement line, and 500 MMAs a further $5 billion, before support infrastructure, weapons and software development are counted. Whether Congress funds that scale will become clear during the FY2028 budget cycle.
Sources
- Remarks by US Air Force Secretary Troy Meink, AFA Air, Space & Cyber Conference 2026, 14 September 2026
- Remarks by US Air Force Chief of Staff General Ken Wilsbach at the same conference
- The War Zone, “Fleet Of At Least 500 Collaborative Combat Aircraft By 2032 Now In USAF’s Plans”, 14 September 2026
