Lockheed’s Vectis Is More Fighter Jet Than Drone

Lockheed Martin's Legendary Skunk Works is continuing to invest in its new AI-piloted drone fighter that they call Vectis, with the aim of getting this loyal wingman into the air next year. And not long after that, if they have their way, delivering the U.S. Air Force a pretty significant boost in both capability and survivability for its drone fighters. So let's talk about what we've learned about this new drone jet and what it says about Lockheed's vision for the future of the collaborative combat aircraft mission. I'm Alex Hollings, and this is Air Power. Later this week, I'm flying out to Lockheed Martin's F-35 production facility in Fort Worth, Texas, to get a tour of how they build these fighters and to watch the rollout of Germany's first new stealth jet. And as luck would have it, that same firm is making headlines this morning for unveiling a full-sized mock-up of their forthcoming Vectis drone and releasing some pretty tantalizing details about the aircraft itself. So I figured I'd put together a quick video about Vectis before I hop my flight to go learn more about F-35s. So bear with me for this lightly scripted dive back into Vectis, and I will be back next week for you guys with the depth that you're more accustomed to. Now, the Air Force currently has two drone fighters, or collaborative combat aircraft, already in active production and expected to reach operational service before the close of this decade. Their Andurils FQ-44A Fury and General Atomics literally just renamed FQ-42A Vengeance. Now, both of these drone fighters were designed to be operated by third-party artificial intelligence that takes its combat cues from a human pilot in another aircraft. And it isn't hyperbole to say that the command and control element of these drones, combined with establishing new human-machine teaming tactics for combat, represent the very cutting edge of military aviation today. But in some ways, the drone fighters themselves should be seen more as stepping stones than a finish line, even as they make their historic entry into active service. You see, these collaborative combat aircraft, or CCAs, were purpose-built to support the air-to-air combat mission, each carrying a pair of AIM-120 AMRAAM radar-guided air-to-air missiles or similarly sized weapons like the new AIM-260 to fly air superiority operations with the first American aircraft that will boast drone wingmen in the fight, America's forthcoming upgraded F-22 Raptors. But the Air Force, not to mention the Navy and the Marine Corps, all have much broader ambitions for this new class of tactical aircraft than air superiority alone. Now, for its part, the Air Force refers to Fury and Vengeance as Increment 1 CCA fighters, meant to be relatively inexpensive and designed to deliver that drone wingman capability to the force as quickly as possible. Then, Increment 1 will be followed by Increment 2, which doesn't currently have disclosed requirements established, and then Increment 2 is meant to be followed by Increment 3, and so on. And that's where Lockheed's hoping to step in with Vectis, which is an internally-funded collaborative combat aircraft aimed at delivering much higher degrees of both capability and survivability than could really be offered by the Air Force's first tranche of fighter drones. Now, Lockheed first announced Vectis to the world back in September of 2025, and we talked about this platform and its potential back then. But at this week's Air Force Association Airspace and Cyber Conference, the firm released a laundry list of new details that helped flesh out this concept a bit, and I thought that was worth discussing. Now Lockheed Martin has claimed to incorporate technologies into this drone that were developed for its 5th generation fighters, the F-22 and F-35, as well as their 6th generation fighter entry that ultimately lost out to Boeing's F-47 proposal for the next-generation air dominance contract. And what that really means is Vectis is not a budget fighter, but rather a truly high-end asset that may well offer some capabilities that even exceed that of piloted 4th gen fighters, particularly when it comes to stealth. Now we also now know the dimensions of this new fighter drone, at about 34 feet long and boasting a 38-foot wingspan, making it about 3 feet wider than an F-35A. Now that makes this platform a Group 5 UAS with a pretty significant margin, which is the largest class of drones and the same class that's occupied by platforms like the FQ-42 and 44, not to mention the MQ-9 Reaper and the RQ-4 Global Hawk. Now we also learned that this aircraft will be powered by a single turbofan engine, but what type or what thrust class has not been disclosed, and as far as I can tell, neither has whether or not it will be afterburning. The most apparent difference between Vectis and an increment 1 drone like the FQ-44 Fury also happens to be the one that Lockheed's officials are the most reluctant to discuss, and that is low observability. Now the very small FQ-44 Fury was designed to carry its twin AMRAAM payload externally, which combined with that single standing vertical tail makes it pretty fair to assume that the design prioritizes its small size and its aerobatic capability more than its stealth. But Vectis, on the other hand, has an overtly low observable design, and Lockheed officials in the past have described it as the most survivable CCA offering on the market. Now the jet's stealthy plane form, its well-defined chine, its lack of any standing vertical tail surfaces, its recessed dorsal intake, and what sure looks to me to be radar absorbent edge treatments all point toward a pretty heavy emphasis on all-aspect stealth more akin to a 6th generation fighter than really any of the CCA drones we've seen so far. And that could make Vectis exceedingly difficult to detect, let alone to target. Now that dorsal-mounted intake isn't completely flush with the airframe, but it is certainly set pretty low in the fuselage. And that would benefit both its stealth and its aerodynamics, meaning its efficiency in terms of range. But it can absolutely come at the expense of performance while flying at high angles of attack or during aggressive maneuvering. And that suggests, at least to me, that it's a design that prioritizes avoiding detection rather than evading inbound missiles. And it's also worth pointing out that while Vectis is all but certain to come with a higher sticker price than the CCAs in production today, using stealth to increase the platform's survivability is also a way to arguably bring down overall costs. If a mid-range, not-particularly-stealth CCA costs $20 million and has a 50% attrition rate in contested airspace, but a higher-end, stealthy drone costs $35 million and can bring that attrition rate down to 10%, well, it becomes more cost-effective to field fewer higher-end drones than more of those less survivable ones. If you take the price of that lower-end drone, $20 million a piece, and divide it by its survival rate of 50% or 0.5, you'd get a cost for each drone that makes it back and can be reused of about $40 million. Then take the more expensive and stealthier drone at a cost of $35 million each and divide that by a survival rate of 90%, and you get a cost of around $38.9 million per returning drone that can be reused for an actual savings of around $1.1 million per surviving aircraft. Now according to The War Zone, Lockheed Martin's general manager for the Skunk Works, Ron Phelan, also highlighted the value of that top-mounted air intake when operating from austere environments, pointing toward the Air Force's really heavy emphasis on Agile Combat Employment, or ACE, operations in recent years. Now, ACE operations basically call for widely distributing your air assets across a whole swath of austere airstrips, runways, patches of highway, flat parts of dirt, and more, all to complicate targeting for adversary planners. And that could be really, really important for CCA-style drones, maybe even more so than for crewed fighters, because those drones tend to lack the range or the ability to conduct supersonic sprints that are possible in their piloted fighter counterparts, so you might have to base them in different places to support the same jobs. Now unlike Increment 1 CCAs, which are focused pretty exclusively on supporting air-to-air combat operations, Vectis is meant to be a truly multi-role platform, even shown launching both what appears to be an AIM-120 AMRAAM and dropping a GBU-53B Small Diameter Bomb II from internal weapon bays in Lockheed's new promotional renders. And that internal bay, of course, boasts the same sort of serrated angular edges that we've all come to expect on stealthy aircraft. Now it's also worth noting that Lockheed's new promotional video showed operators commanding Vectis drones from a ground station that looks a bit like a futuristic MQ-9 setup, rather than solely from the cockpits of other fighters. And that highlights that this more broadly capable drone fighter is meant to be able to conduct at least some kinds of operations without any direct oversight from a manned aircraft, all while relying on high degrees of onboard autonomy to be able to respond to inbound threats like surface-to-air missiles, rather than waiting for a command to be relayed from that ground control station to react. That's really one of the biggest challenges facing MQ-9 Reapers today. And while we're talking about control and autonomy, it's also worth talking about how Lockheed's got pretty substantial experience in that space. I mean, they obviously played a direct role in converting an F-16 into the X-62 Vista that's currently being used to conduct air-to-air intercepts of human piloted fighters under AI control, and has been dogfighting human piloted fighters under AI control for years now already. But their practical demonstrations of manned-unmanned teaming actually date back even further than that Skyborg program that's still going on. More than ten years ago now, back in 2015, Lockheed Martin's Have Raider One program saw that same X-62 autonomously conduct formation flights alongside a crewed fighter, really sort of laying the groundwork for CCA drones to come. By 2017, that X-62 served as a surrogate CCA, using the same onboard autonomy software to conduct an air-to-ground strike mission exercise while reacting in real-time to a dynamic threat environment in what was called Have Raider Two. Then, in 2022, Lockheed Martin announced Project Carrera, a $100 million effort to pair F-35s with air-launched drones that were called Speed Racer at the time, but were, well, let's be honest, very similar if not the same thing as Lockheed's recently unveiled Comet or Comet multi-mission truck drones. In 2024, Lockheed Skunk Works teamed up with Iowa's Operator Performance Laboratory to use one of their L-29 Delphin jets as a surrogate CCA, and controlled by that same autonomy software, that L-29 engaged a variety of virtual adversaries while flying in the very real sky, conducting head-to-head dogfights, to airstrike support operations, to even missile intercept missions. Now, according to Dr. Tom Mach-Schnell from the Iowa Technology Institute, that L-29 performed even better in the real world than it had in their simulated environment. There are several other Lockheed-led AI piloting efforts underway, some that we've talked about on this channel, and certainly a bunch more behind the veil of classified funding. According to Lockheed's O.J. Sanchez, the firm has even already begun simulating air combat missions in a digital environment that include a single F-22 Raptor serving as the coordinator for four Vectis drones, and in the past, Lockheed Martin has also disclosed conducting similar simulations with a single F-35 effectively controlling as many as eight CCA-style drones. Now, Lockheed Martin's officials would not directly address the price point of Vectis, only saying that the target is to be competitive in the CCA space, but they did acknowledge that the platform's gonna cost more than a treadable or the semi-disposable drone fighter designs that are being offered up by some firms, and that the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps are certainly also interested in. In a real way, Vectis is being presented as a huge stepping stone toward CCA-style drone fighters that offer similarly broad mission sets and capabilities to today's piloted fighters. And when you combine that with a really heavy emphasis on low observability, I mean we should expect this platform to cost well into the tens of millions of dollars. After all, if Anduril's Fury and General Atomic's Vengeance are expected to ring in at between twenty and thirty million bucks a fighter, a substantially more capable platform is certain to cost even more. And that actually points to the biggest question I still have about Vectis, and that is, what signals is Lockheed Skunkworks getting from the Pentagon about this effort? You see, public discussions about increment two of the CCA program have really suggested that the Air Force might be looking for cheaper, more attritable, or even disposable drone wingman designs from increment two, leaning even harder into that affordable mass that those kinds of CCAs could deliver. And while there is certainly no shortage of firms competing for a chance to become the Pentagon's supplier of choice for those cheaper drones, Lockheed seems to have its sights set squarely on developing and fielding AI-enabled fighter drones that are just way more capable, or way more gold-plated, than the Air Force has acknowledged having an appetite for. But while there are no lines of accounting that are already allocated for higher-end CCAs, Lockheed seems pretty confident that there is a market for them, and to that point they are self-financing the production of five prototype Vectis drone fighters, the first of which is already being built to begin flight testing next year, all, again, without a clear demand signal, at least in the public sphere, that the U.S. military is even in the market for what they're selling. But conversely, it's hard to make the argument that platforms like Vectis aren't just the inevitable result of the development work being done in the CCA space today. I mean, to some extent, increment one needs to crawl so increment two can walk, and so on and so forth, but at some point in the not-too-distant future, those challenges are going to be a thing of the past, and the only logical places to go from there is either increased volume or increased capability, to create a high-low mix of uncrewed platforms and standoff systems. And that is, in fact, how Lockheed Martin pitched its ecosystem of drones and missiles going back as far as 2022, with their low-cost cruise missiles like Comet or the Common Multi-Mission Truck meant to carry sensor payloads and serve as single-use drones, while slightly pricier ISR and CCA-style drones take on a bit less risk, and then higher-end or exquisite reusable drones taking on even less risk, and then finally, crewed aircraft operating the furthest removed from those threats. And as I've argued in the past, development of CCA drones throughout at least the American aerospace industry so far has, to some extent, really mirrored the development of tactical aircraft as a whole, just on a much more abbreviated timeline. For decades, just about every major mission set came with a purpose-built aircraft to do that job, but as systems began to mature and technology started to shrink, we began to see those roles consolidate into fewer types of jets. There was a time when attack aircraft like the A-6 Intruder or A-4 Skyhawk would handle air-to-ground operations, while fighters were relegated to air-to-air duties. But then in 1991, an F-18 Hornet became the first fighter in history to seamlessly transition from engaging an airborne target to a surface target with just the flip of a switch, and Seemingly overnight, specialized attack aircraft began to disappear from American rosters in favor of more modern multi-role fighter designs. And likewise, electronic warfare aircraft are still a vital element of American air operations, but increasingly, advanced fighters are now carrying their own powerful electronic warfare capabilities, while others are finding their way to air-launched drones that could be carried by any tactical aircraft as this process continues. And likewise, the Air Force's CCA plans to date have called for specialized single-mission platforms like the air-to-air focused FQ-42 and 44, and in keeping with that, most CCA drones that are flying today tend to have a pretty singular focus. Now there are some, like Kratos' XQ-58, that is rapidly maturing into a full line of different but similar drones for different but similar jobs. Or like General Atomics' Gambit line, which shares a great deal of commonality across a whole series of drones, but that are nonetheless different aircraft. And that makes perfect sense for the current state of CCA or Drone Wingman technology. But it seems clear that Lockheed's not aiming for the current state of things with Vectis. Lockheed is aiming to hop out in front. Then, Lockheed is not aiming for Vectis to be as expensive as the more complex modern fighters that have to carry bags of meat in them, like the F-35, which Lockheed also builds. And in order to meet that criteria, they say they've placed a heavy emphasis on not just designing and testing the platform in a digital environment, but also using that same approach to streamline production. Now Lockheed officials explained that they worked to minimize the amount of tooling that each component requires, while also simplifying the design to maximize the ease of assembly. This is something we're hearing from a lot of firms lately, maybe Anduril most of all. And doing that, Lockheed says, will not only keep costs down, but it'll also improve production capacity, because you can build more drones in less time. So what do you think? Is Lockheed right to be investing so heavily in a drone fighter that's this much better in terms of capability and stealth than the ones the Air Force is asking for? In my mind, it is a winning bet just as long as Lockheed can stomach the cost for as long as it might take for the defense apparatus to be ready for these higher-end CCA offerings. And I would imagine that they do know something we don't, but I'm interested to hear your perspective. Sound off in the comments below, and while you're at it, let me know if you've got any questions to ask about F-35 production while I'm out there in Fort Worth, Texas. And with that, we'll end this episode of Air Power from Sandbox News. I'm Alex Hollings. Make sure to download the Sandbox News app that's available for iOS now to get access to all of our great written content and all of the videos that we produce. 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