Expect Air Force’s first robot wingmen to be AMRAAM ‘trucks’

Weapons-builder RTX is working with General Atomics and Anduril to fit air-to-air missiles on the first set of Air Force drones that will fly and fight alongside fighter pilots in combat.  

The service has set RTX’s Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile as a “threshold weapon”—read: a required one—for its collaborative combat aircraft program, said Jon Norman, RTX’s vice president of requirements and capabilities for air and space defense systems. 

Drones in “increment one” of the CCA program will essentially act as missile trucks hauling air-to-air capability for manned fighters, Norman said. 

“Think of it as an air-to-air truck that can be out in an environment, and now you can have a controlling aircraft, whether that's an F-35 or an F-22, that can use those collaborative combat aircraft as a force extender so they have more munitions available. It does us no good if we have an F-35 and it's carrying its load of AMRAAMs and AIM-9s and it fires all those and now it has to go back to reload. With the collaborative combat aircraft, now it has a platform out there that's in the right position, survivable, and it can employ AMRAAMs guided and directed by that F-35 or by the F-22,” Norman told reporters Tuesday. 

Norman said RTX is working with the other companies—which are already on contract to develop the initial CCAs—to fit the weapons on those offerings, which will likely fly in 2025 before the service makes a production decision for increment one in 2026. 

RTX will max out AMRAAM production at 1,200 rounds per year for the foreseeable future to keep pace with global demand for the missile. And while the company continues to pump out the older version, it’s also been developing a new variant, called the AIM-120D3, which will deliver more range.

Norman cited an upcoming test of the new variant on an F-35, which will “almost double” the range of what AMRAAM has flown before. The company didn’t change the propulsion on the missile, but “changed the way it flies for long-range shots,” so it has more kinetic energy when it hits the target.

“What that does is it brings us back into parity, and we actually exceed a lot of the capability of all the pacing threats worldwide. So it makes AMRAAM kind of future-proof,” he said. 

The Air Force eventually plans to replace AMRAAMs with Lockheed’s secretive Joint Advanced Tactical Missile, whose longer reach is intended to counter China’s growing arsenal of long-range missiles like the PL-15. 

But the new AIM-120D3 variant will be able to keep pace with the threat, Norman said, adding that its range is classified. 

He said AMRAAM and JATM are “complementary,” and that new AMRAAM developments will get the missile close to JATM’s minimum range requirement. JATM will be “a very expensive weapon, but very capable when it's fielded and fully operational. The capacity weapon, I think for the foreseeable future, is going to be AMRAAM.”

Air Force officials have said that once everything is ready, CCAs will also carry JATM.