Just one year ago, Collaborative Combat Aircraft took center stage as then-Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin designated the two competing jets prototypes as the first unmanned fighters in Air Force history: General Atomics’ YFQ-42A and Anduril Industries’ YFQ-44A. Twelve months later, it’s the autonomy software that’s flying those aircraft garnering the attention. Autonomy software, more than hardware, may prove the most valuable and enduring element of the CCA ...

Beast in the Machine

Feb. 6, 2026
The first wave of the robotic revolution is underway: smart, precision-guided weapons are proliferating into every corner of war. The big cruise missiles and laser-guided smart bombs that revolutionized air campaigns in operation Desert Storm and thereafter were only a prelude. Today, precision is rapidly ...
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week released strategies meant to focus the Pentagon’s “alphabet soup” of innovation organizations and proliferate artificial intelligence—moves that experts say could provide the structure needed to make the military’s efforts to integrate and field new technology more effective.
When lawmakers and outside experts turn their attention to how the U.S. military can use of artificial intelligence, they tend to focus on weapons systems—the most consequential and risk-laden use cases—and on generative AI. But behind the scenes, the Air Force is already using machine ...
Now that the Air Force is starting to deploy artificial intelligence operationally, service leaders are grappling with AI’s limitations—not just what it can and cannot do, but the extensive data and technical and human infrastructure it needs to work.
Following the carnage of trench warfare in World War I, airpower enthusiasts imagined a new kind of combat that would reduce the human toll of war. Yet even with today’s precision weapons, civilian casualties remain a constant. Now some see artificial intelligence as a means ...