Arlington, VA | March 25, 2025 — The Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies is pleased to announce a new entry in its Research Studies series, Logistics While Under Attack: Key to a CCA Force Design by Col Mark A. Gunzinger, USAF (Ret.), Director of Future Concepts and Capability Assessments at the Mitchell Institute.

The U.S. Air Force now lacks a counterair force that is adequately sized and shaped to achieve the degree of air superiority required to defeat China in a Pacific conflict—DOD’s stated pacing challenge. The Air Force is developing collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) with autonomous technologies and other novel capabilities to help offset its counterair mission deficits.

This will require the Air Force and its industry partners to continue to mature technologies that are key to developing CCA that can operate in a highly collaborative fashion with other aircraft. CCA will act as force multipliers that complement—but do not replace—the service’s F-22s, F-35s, and future F-47s. This collaborative combination will pose a diverse threat that is more difficult for adversaries to accurately characterize and counter in highly dynamic, time-compressed operational environments. On the ground, a distributed CCA posture will complicate China’s ability to effectively find, fix, target, and attack the Air Force’s counterair forces and bases.

These advantages will not be realized without adequate personnel, fuel, theater airlift, and other logistics required to generate hundreds of CCA sorties per day. These logistics should not be an afterthought, but a requirement that informs their key performance parameters, the mix of CCA the Air Force acquires, and how they are employed.

This report summarizes insights from the third in a series of Mitchell Institute exercises that explored the potential for CCA with autonomous technologies to perform as counterair force multipliers. Its recommendations are derived from the assessments of teams of Air Force and industry planners, operational experts, and technologists on potential CCA use cases and logistics required to generate CCA sorties during a major Pacific conflict.

The Mitchell Institute’s Research Studies serve as an authoritative avenue for innovative, in-depth, insightful, and effective ideas and solutions for strengthening America’s aerospace power.

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Copies of Policy Papers can be downloaded at https://mitchellaerospacepower.org/category/publications/