Luke Diaz is a freelance military writer with experience with active duty experience in the US Navy as well as defense and industrial engineering. He is a former Naval Flight Officer who performed tactical air control on the carrier-based E-2 Hawkeye.
The world's first fifth-generation stealth fighter jet took flight 29 years ago, but the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor isn't done making history yet. Despite being decades older than its predecessor, Lockheed's own F-35 Lightning II, the Raptor remains the Apex air superiority platform of the US Air Force, which has positioned it to become the first 'quarterback' that will command loyal wingman drones, according to the official announcement on October 16.
The service stated that it had already taken the first step in early October when an F-22 Raptor pilot successfully assumed command of an Anduril YFQ-44A Fury CCA during a flight test at Edwards Air Force Base, California. This marks a major tactical evolution for the Raptor, which was originally conceived during the Cold War as a lone wolf stealth hunter of nuclear bombers in a doomsday contest between great powers.
Despite nearing the twilight of its frontline career, the F-22 is receiving a series of upgrades in the Raptor 2.0 package that will modernize it for at least another decade of active service alongside the first combat-ready CCAs. The F-22 will effectively transition from a pure air dominance platform to a stealth battlefield manager. This will allow the Raptor to not only serve as a bridge until the Boeing F-47 arrives to take its place, but also pioneer the tactics that will be employed by the first sixth-generation fighters.
The First Raptor To Command A Loyal Wingman
The announcement marks a major step forward for the Air Force and its loyal wingman program. It is less of a landmark moment and more of an iterative progression toward the final goal. The F-22 was able to handle a single YFQ-44A over several hours, according to Air & Space Forces Magazine. During the test flight, the pilot of the Raptor communicated technical commands over the air in real time to the CCA, which performed as ordered. However, no specifics as to what exactly was executed were elaborated on.
The test does solidify that the loyal wingman drones will be semi-autonomous and not require a remote pilot in order to fly while remaining under the tactical direction of human operators. This is a significant step forward from the previous generation of unmanned aerial vehicles used by the US and other militaries around the world, which require human input when everything is in flight.
The ability to simply give the CCA an order, and it figuring out how to execute that task on its own, greatly alleviates the human burden, which transforms a single crew of F-22s into a virtual squadron leader. As an airborne quarterback, the USAF wants to pair the F-22 with three to five drones per fighter jet. That would give the Air Force the ability to magnify the strategic impact of a single squadron of crewed fighters to cover far larger areas of the battle space. It also adds another layer of protection that protects both human lives and reduces the exposure to enemy fire of far more costly and sophisticated aircraft.
Why The Air Force Put The Raptor First
The strategic necessity of the CCA program is twofold. The primary driver behind the urgency to deploy loyal wingmen now is the rapid advance by near-peer adversaries like China and Russia. However, the diminishing fleet size of the USAF is also spreading its current inventory thin across multiple theaters around the globe. Dropping below 5,000 airframes for the first time since WWII, divestment of legacy planes has gone ahead while multiple next-gen procurement programs are behind schedule.
Airframes that are either failing to deliver planes on time or behind schedule due to technical deficiencies include headline platforms like the F-35, Boeing's F-15EX Eagle II, and KC-46 Pegasus, among others. The added pressure on the fleet and crews has been magnified by the losses suffered during Operation Epic Fury, which not only saw over 40 aircraft destroyed but also severely depleted the strategic stockpile of munitions.
The F-22 Raptor was expected to be winding down and headed toward the boneyard by the end of this decade, but with the F-47 likely three years behind schedule before even leaving the drawing board, the Raptor 2.0 program is a necessary bridge to ensure combat readiness levels. While crewed next-gen aircraft remain a roadblock to modernization, pushing ahead with CCAs offers an avenue to rapidly improve Force capability at a far lower price point while refining technology that will be necessary well into the future as the upcoming platforms arrive.
How The Raptor And Its Drone Stay In Touch
The F-22 was originally engineered for absolute signal silence during the Cold War. Its radar-absorbent materials were complemented by a discrete data link that essentially only connected to other Raptors and fighter controllers aboard AWACS. This design limited tactical data to its Intra-Flight Data Link, isolating the jet from modern Link-16-capable units. In its long-delayed combat debut over Syria, this forced pilots to transmit targeting data to fourth-generation aircraft over open-voice radios due to the lack of a standard two-way data link.
To resolve these limitations, the Air Force initiated rapid software development programs to integrate Link 16. The service is now executing a multi-billion-dollar modernization campaign to transform the iconic air-superiority fighter into a fully networked tactical node. Raptor 2.0 implements advanced digital capabilities to match the sensor fusion of the F-35, integrating a helmet-mounted display that allows pilots to assign CCA tasks via line-of-sight cueing.
The 'Super Raptor' cockpit interfaces with Electro Optical Search and Track pods and embedded infrared sensors. These provide full spherical tracking without emitting radio signals that could reveal the aircraft's position to enemy sensors, allowing the pilot to coordinate Loyal Wingmen entirely in stealth. This concept relies on a diverse inventory of CCAs designed to expand sensor mass and provide off-board missile capacity around the fighter.
While flight tests validated an F-22 transmitting airborne directives to a pre-production YFQ-44A Fury, the CCA ecosystem spans multiple platforms. General Atomics is developing the modular YFQ-42 Dark Merlin, similar to the Fury and the MQ-20 Avenger, as a high-altitude autonomous sentry CCA that provides persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.
The Boeing Australia MQ-28 Ghost Bat provides extended range and ordnance capacity for Indo-Pacific joint operations with the Royal Australian Air Force. Additionally, the US Marines are the furthest along, with the rocket-launched Kratos XQ-58A Valkyrie advancing to low-rate initial production and even answering license joint production with Airbus in Europe. It will provide a pan-NATO CCA capable of collaborating with any advanced aircraft in the alliance to receive orders on the fly, just like US and RAAF CCAs in the Pacific.
The Workload Problem In A Single-Seat Cockpit
The primary operational hurdle of this pairing centers on the immense cognitive workload burden placed on a pilot inside a single-seat fighter jet. In 21st-century modern air warfare, forcing a pilot to manually fly an accompanying uncrewed wingman during high-intensity engagements is nearly impossible. The integration of CCAs into fifth- and sixth-generation combat networks is critical to countering the rapid military modernization of near-peer adversaries like China and Russia.
As these adversaries deploy sophisticated integrated air defense systems and mass-produced fighter fleets, conventional air forces face severe attrition risks and capacity limits. The October test flight successfully demonstrated how advanced software autonomy solves this single-seat workload bottleneck. Rather than micromanaging the flight paths or flight surfaces of the YFQ-44A, the Raptor pilot utilized a tactical data link to transmit high-level, operationally relevant mission directives directly from the cockpit.
Incorporating autonomous uncrewed platforms directly addresses these challenges by projecting affordable mass and extending the operational reach of crewed assets. CCAs act as forward weapons bays, carrying extra air-to-air and air-to-ground ordnance. This allows stealth fighters like the F-22 or F-35 to maintain a low radar cross-section by carrying weapons internally while leveraging the external payloads of accompanying drones.
CCAs In The Pivot To The Pacific: Agile Combat Employment
This autonomous integration sits at the absolute core of the Air Force's Agile Combat Employment doctrine, which replaces large, centralized hubs with a highly dispersed network of austere island airfields. In a potential high-intensity conflict, the tyranny of distance forces conventional short-range stealth fighters to operate far from their staging bases, heavily dependent on a vulnerable fleet of aerial refueling tankers.
By shifting the uncrewed command role to an F-22 quarterback, the service creates a highly resilient, forward-deployed combat network capable of surviving in deeply contested airspace. Operating ahead of crewed fighters, autonomous drones utilize infrared and passive radar sensors to scout hostile airspace.
They stream real-world targeting data back to the human pilot without forcing the primary fighter to emit signals that expose its position. This decentralized control loop allows a single-seat fighter pilot to manage a complex robot team while simultaneously flying and fighting their own aircraft.
This is all made entirely possible by the rapid maturation of AI-powered software autonomy, which shifts the pilot's role from a manual remote controller to an airborne director of operations. This AI-driven integration transforms the F-22 from an aging fighter into a highly connected combat mothership. Utilizing artificial intelligence to orchestrate a distributed forward shield of robot wingmen, the Air Force secures the F-22's tactical relevance against sophisticated peer defense networks well into the 21st century.