Because Boeing Australia is doing MQ-28 in Australia rather than USA
MQ-28 is
not an Australian only endeavor.
@Scott Kenny To add to what bring_it_on was saying, I'm of the opinion that the sensor suites being procured for CCAs speak to the following three things:
1. The current state of combat aircraft autonomy
2. Currently acceptable risk thanks to where the autonomy is
3. Planned means of deployment
The impression that I've got regarding combat aircraft autonomy currently is that many leaders know that it is important, but exactly what can be done with it and how precisely it is
best used is going to remain unclear until the first increment 1 CCAs reach the Test and Eval squadrons and new tactics begin to be developed and implemented. Meanwhile, what we can learn through simulations is possibly what is being used to inform increment 2, which opened the floor to both higher end and lower end CCAs.
We also continue to be risk averse in tech development. Contrary to other places, much of new technology is matured as plugins to existing systems before a fully functional all new piece of tech is built. I would say that autonomy itself is not mature enough yet as a technology to warrant that investment. It's not necessarily because the autonomy software and algorithms isn't there. Instead, its because the tactics, operating experience and best use cases have yet to take shape. I would expect that once the feedback from operational usage of increment 1 gets solidified and the list of "would like to haves" begin to change, there will be major design changes informing the next family of CCAs (not necessarily Inc2 though). I wouldn't say it's
trivial to design a full fighter sized wingman drone, and it's certainly what could have been done right off the bat, but until we really begin to evaluate and understand how wingmen drones are to be used, procuring fighter sized CCAs does not tangibly bring better results to the force while still extracting a hefty maintenance cost.
Speaking of usage, the current operational concept is about omnipresence inside a battle space. In one of the other threads, someone posted a what-if image of how J-36s could be used to fight B-21s, and one of the excerpts comically draws a detection bubble from a CCA and wrote "inadequate detection range" on it. Thing is - you don't necessarily need to be the emitter to be the dectector. Hell - you may not even need a radar to receive multistatic returns coming back from the target after being illuminated by something else. It is possible to have an emitter illuminate the location of a target with a small radar and still have enough energy be reflected off to a bad angle, where another CCA with a sufficient RF receiver could catch the target at said bad angle and start a IR track. How practical is it and how multistatic radar technology could be turned into real tactics and produce real results is probably less well known until test and eval does their work. It could also be possible that once those results come back around, the operational concept could either lean further into that idea or we could certainly go back to larger more capable concepts.
It's not to say that larger and more capable concepts aren't being investigated either. If I recall correctly
@bring_it_on said before that larger and more capable concepts are being worked on. However, again - developing the large and complex CCA shouldn't be a challenge to any of the primes. People might laugh, but the MQ-25 is actually larger than an F-16 size wise. If not for it's inherent role as a tanker and ISR platform, it could certainly have been a "fighter sized CCA". The question isn't "why don't we have this" or "why aren't we going in that direction". The questions are do we actually need it? and exactly what do we need from it?
/j
