What Korea's collaborative combat aircraft must overcome is not airframe development but the wall of force design
Hear the term collaborative combat aircraft, or CCA, and many people first think of an 'unmanned fighter': an aircraft that flies alongside a manned fighter, detects the enemy, conducts electronic warfare and, when needed, releases weapons. The picture is not wrong. But that description alone makes it easy to miss the essence of CCA.
CCA is not a program to make a single fighter unmanned. It is about building an air force that sees farther, moves more and adapts faster by tying manned fighters, drones, sensors, communications networks, command-and-control systems and mission software into a single combat system. At a recent panel discussion on CCA strategy and Korea–US cooperation, too, the focus was less on the shape of the airframe than on how those airframes are connected, how they are operated, and how quickly they can take on new technology.
The reason is clear. Today's air combat has become an environment in which superiority can hardly be guaranteed by the performance of a few expensive fighters alone. On a battlefield where dense air-defense networks, long-range missiles, and electronic and information warfare are combined, an air force needs assets that can take on risk first, assets that can gather information over a wider area, and assets that can raise the density of its forces when needed. CCA fills exactly that gap. It enters dangerous airspace ahead of others to conduct surveillance and reconnaissance, disrupts enemy radars and air-defense networks, and widens the survivability and strike opportunities of manned fighters. It is closer to a new member that changes the game of combat itself than to a supporting actor standing in for the lead.
In this context, an approach that tries to build CCA as a 'small replica' of the manned fighter should be guarded against. If CCA is operated in exactly the same way as manned aircraft, tied to the same long-term maintenance system and held to the same survivability standards, the flexibility and advantage in numbers it can offer shrink. CCA's strength does not lie in performing every mission perfectly on its own. It lies in raising the combat power of the whole manned–unmanned team by dividing roles such as surveillance and reconnaissance, electronic warfare, communications relay, decoy, escort of manned aircraft and weapons carriage.
Here the first task Korea should note is architecture rather than airframe. If a particular company's airframe and a particular company's software are tightly bound together, the force soon becomes dependent on the supplier's technology cycle and business schedule. If a better algorithm or a new sensor cannot be attached quickly when it appears, the speed advantage that unmanned systems have disappears.
This is also why the US Air Force is building a government-owned autonomy reference architecture and seeking to separate airframes from mission-autonomy software. Only if different companies' software can be loaded onto different airframes does technological competition stay alive and can the best performance be adopted quickly as the battlefield changes. The real contest in the CCA competition lies not in who designs the more eye-catching fuselage, but in who creates and manages the more open and secure rules of connection.
Korea cannot avoid this question either. In developing a Korean CCA, simply adopting US standards is not enough. Korea should align early on the data, interfaces and security standards needed for combined Korea–US operations, while also making clear the testing, certification and data rights that the Korean government must control. It must be designed what information the KF-21, ground and maritime command-and-control systems, surveillance and reconnaissance assets and the many unmanned systems to come will share, and who will hold final authority. Building an airframe that can be exported and building a combat system that works within an allied system are not the same thing.
The second task is a change in the way of acquisition. CCA runs on software, sensors, batteries and communications technology that evolve far faster than fighters. An approach that aims to build a perfect system in a single development effort struggles to keep pace with technological change. That is why an 'increment' approach matters: rather than over-inflating performance, cost and schedule in the first configuration, field usable capability first and improve it in the next configuration. Instead of waiting for perfection, it is a way of quickly building a better next generation based on feedback from the field.
That does not mean rapid acquisition equals cheap, disposable equipment. The 'attritability' of CCA does not mean it may be built cheaply and lost easily. It is force design that calculates what level of loss can be accepted in which mission and how quickly losses can be replenished. In the end, what matters is not the price tag of a single airframe but cost per mission, availability, the reliability of communications and autonomy, and the resilience of production and supply.
At this point the logistics perspective becomes even more important. For CCA to play its part in actual combat, it must be backed by a system that allows module replacement and forward maintenance, distributed supply and rapid software updates. The supply chains of key items such as rare-earth magnets, propulsion and power systems, batteries, and navigation and communications semiconductors must also be examined. In peacetime this may look like a procurement problem for a single part, but in a contingency it is a security problem that determines whether mass operations can be sustained.
The conditions of the Korean Peninsula make CCA's performance requirements even more complex. On the peninsula, short warning times, dense threats, limited operating space and the vulnerability of bases must be taken into account. At the same time, from the perspective of the surrounding seas and combined operations, longer-range surveillance, electronic warfare and sharing of targeting information are also needed. Rather than searching for a single 'all-purpose CCA' that solves every mission, it is therefore more realistic to place mission-specific configurations on a common architecture: sharing a common language of data and software, while optimizing some airframes for surveillance and reconnaissance, others for electronic warfare, and still others for escorting manned aircraft and carrying weapons.
In this process, the role of the manned pilot also needs to be redefined. AI and autonomy will reduce the pilot's cognitive load and allow more unmanned assets to be handled. But critical judgments such as the use of weapons cannot be handed over to machines. The core of the CCA era is not getting rid of the pilot. It is using the speed, numbers and sensing capability of machines while humans retain command intent and responsibility. Technological progress must not lead to a vacuum of responsibility.
Korea–US–Japan cooperation should start from the same principle. Korea's manufacturing capability and Japan's materials and components technology have the potential to complement each other. Defense cooperation, however, must overcome the real walls of history and politics, law and export controls. Rather than rushing into joint development of sensitive systems, it is therefore wiser to widen practical common ground first, such as interoperability standards, testing and quality assurance, battery safety, maintenance data formats and supply-chain resilience. Cooperation begins not with declarations but with standards that can be used together and supply chains that can endure together.
The competition around CCA has already moved beyond the airframe development stage. The question now is not only 'what drone will we build'. Who will control the data? Who will set the interfaces and certification standards? How quickly can software be changed? Is the speed of production and supply enough to absorb losses? And how will manned and unmanned forces be tied into a single combat system?
The essence of CCA lies not in a single unmanned fighter but in building an air force with more options and a shorter adaptation cycle. What Korea must design first now is not only wings and fuselages. It is the connectivity that lets those wings move together, and the operational and logistics system that will support it.
Colonel (Ret.) KIM Yong-sun is a security, defense and defense-industry expert. He has served as defense attaché to NATO and the EU and as defense logistics attaché to the United States.
