The U.S. Air Force plans to field at least 500 collaborative combat aircraft by 2032. Its FY2027 request includes $996.5 million for procurement, $150 million for advance procurement, and $1.37 billion for continued development.
Demand is no longer the central question. Production is.
The CCA program has moved rapidly. General Atomics’ FQ-42A reached first flight in August 2025, Anduril’s FQ-44A entered flight testing in October 2025, and Anduril completed its first production airframe in July 2026. The program also completed an AIM-120 live-fire engagement that month.
But speed to first flight measures development. Scaling hundreds of aircraft depends on a different system: qualified factories, suppliers, inspection capacity, engines, electronics, and test infrastructure.
The Production Bottlenecks
| Choke point | Why it binds | Capacity / qualification lead time | Primary mitigation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Turbine propulsion | Castings, rotating hardware, controls, test cells | 12–30 months | Long-lead buys; common engines; second sources; vertical integration |
| Five-axis CNC and fixtures | Complex structures, housings, engine components | 6–15 months | Reserved capacity; duplicate fixtures; automation; dual sourcing |
| Composite tooling and cure | Tooling, cure cycles, trimming, inspection | 9–24 months | Duplicate tools; parallel cure; out-of-autoclave processes |
| Avionics, RF, compute, navigation | Defense-grade semiconductor and packaging constraints | 6–18 months | Modular architectures; qualified substitutes; lifetime buys |
| Metrology and NDT | More machining creates proportional inspection demand | 4–12 months | Automated CMM; in-process probing; digital inspection |
| Flight and weapons testing | Range slots, telemetry, approvals, airspace | 2–9 months scheduling; 18–36 months for major expansion | Parallel ranges; simulation; more test assets; government investment |
These constraints interact. Expanding machining capacity without expanding inspection, propulsion, or test capacity simply moves the bottleneck downstream.
Production learning also matters. With an 85–90% cumulative learning curve applied to the portion of aircraft cost sensitive to repetition, several production doublings can reduce total unit cost materially. Affordable mass therefore requires volume before the full cost advantage appears.
This creates a financing problem. Suppliers will not buy expensive machines, tooling, or inspection equipment against uncertain prototype orders. Multi-year commitments, advance procurement, and minimum production quantities convert expected demand into financeable industrial capacity.
A Modular Vendor Structure
CCA programs already show a division between airframe and autonomy layers.
| Program | Airframe | Autonomy / mission system |
|---|---|---|
| Air Force CCA Increment 1 | General Atomics FQ-42A; Anduril FQ-44A | Vendor-integrated |
| Marine Corps MUX TACAIR | Kratos XQ-58A Valkyrie | Northrop Grumman Prism |
| German UCCA | Kratos XQ-58A Valkyrie | Airbus MARS |
Autonomy is increasingly modular. Northrop software can sit on a Kratos airframe for the Marine Corps, while Airbus integrates its own system onto the same platform in Germany. This separates the economics of aircraft production from those of mission software.
Kratos occupies the airframe and manufacturing layer. Its target-drone business provides repeated production experience, customer qualification, and a design culture built around lower-cost expendable systems. The XQ-58A extends that approach into tactical unmanned aviation.
The Air Force nevertheless selected General Atomics and Anduril for its first increment. The emerging market is therefore structurally multi-vendor rather than platform-locked.
Kratos and the Manufacturing Layer
Kratos reported Q2 2026 revenue of $458.8 million, including $79.1 million from Unmanned Systems, with total backlog near $2.08 billion.
Its propulsion business matters because engines are one of the hardest production constraints. Technical Directions, a Kratos subsidiary, manufactures the Spartan turbojet family in Michigan. Its TDI-J85 was selected for Boeing’s JDAM-LR program, and Kratos has already purchased long-lead material for 2027 production.
The Spartan does not power the Valkyrie. The strategic point is broader: low-cost airframes do not create affordable mass when propulsion remains scarce.
Kratos’ key assets are:
- repeated target-drone production and qualification;
- design-to-cost engineering;
- experience integrating with government test and weapons systems;
- domestic small-turbine capability;
- an established airframe suitable for multiple autonomy stacks.
Its main unresolved problem is high-rate tactical-aircraft production. The critical evidence will be funded production lots, supplier commitments, advance procurement, and declining labor hours per aircraft.
FANUC and the Control-Layer Analogy
Industrial automation shows the same economic structure in a mature market.
FANUC has produced more than one million industrial robots and operates more than 270 service locations across more than 100 countries. New competitors can increasingly match payload, repeatability, and basic robot-arm performance. The arm itself is becoming less differentiated.
The surrounding production system is harder to replace.
| Layer | Competitive state |
|---|---|
| Robot arm hardware | Increasingly commoditized |
| CNC and servo integration | Strong FANUC position in machine-tool cells |
| Installed-base learning | One million deployed robots generate operating data |
| Service and spare parts | Large global network creates switching costs |
| Programming UX and AI | New entrants push faster; FANUC is integrating modern AI |
Factories do not buy only an actuator. They buy uptime, service response, spare parts, controls, qualification, and integration with existing production lines.
FANUC’s work with AI, digital twins, NVIDIA, and Google therefore attaches new software capability to an industrial installed base that newer entrants must build from scratch.
The same principle applies to unmanned aircraft: hardware can become cheaper while qualified integration, control, service, and production infrastructure retain economic value.
The Policy Lever: Demand Certainty
The government cannot demand surge capacity while purchasing aircraft as isolated demonstrations. Suppliers invest when expected utilization justifies fixed capital.
The FY2027 CCA request already reflects this through $150 million of advance procurement.
| Instrument | Economic mechanism |
|---|---|
| Multi-year or block procurement | Raises expected factory utilization |
| Advance procurement | Starts engines and long-lead electronics earlier |
| Minimum annual quantities | Makes supplier investment financeable |
| DPA co-investment | Shares fixed-cost risk at difficult bottlenecks |
| Test-range expansion | Removes government-controlled constraints |
| Allied procurement | Increases cumulative production volume |
Domestic production can cost more in peacetime while remaining cheaper in strategic terms. A slightly more expensive domestic engine has greater wartime value than a foreign engine whose availability disappears during conflict.
What to Watch
The useful indicators are production signals, not additional concept demonstrations:
- Funded annual quantities for the FQ-42A and FQ-44A.
- Advance purchases of engines and long-lead electronics.
- Supplier capacity tied to specific aircraft.
- Falling labor hours per airframe.
- International production orders.
- Repeat Kratos target-drone production as the industrial baseline.
For industrial automation, watch service revenue, machine-tool installation share, and whether easier programming strengthens or bypasses incumbent control ecosystems.
Conclusion
Affordable mass is primarily a factory problem.
The Pentagon can design and test unmanned aircraft quickly. Producing hundreds at low cost requires propulsion, machining, composites, electronics, inspection, skilled labor, and test infrastructure to scale together.
That shifts value toward qualified bottlenecks and toward companies that already know how to manufacture, integrate, inspect, support, and repeatedly deliver complex hardware.
Kratos illustrates the emerging unmanned-aircraft model: affordable airframes, domestic propulsion capability, and production experience combined with modular autonomy supplied by multiple vendors. FANUC illustrates the mature industrial version: the physical actuator becomes cheaper, while control, integration, service, and installed infrastructure remain difficult to displace.
The central industrial opportunity is not another prototype. It is the reconstruction of a production system capable of converting defense R&D into affordable mass.