YFQ-44 Fury Fighter Drone Wraps Contested Operations Test That Could Accelerate Its Fielding

Summary

The U.S. Air Force has successfully completed a critical operational exercise with Anduril's YFQ-44 Fury fighter drone at Edwards Air Force Base, marking a significant milestone in the service's Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program. The exercise, conducted jointly by Air Combat Command's Experimental Operations Unit and Air Force Materiel Command's 412th Test Wing, focused on testing the drone's ability to be deployed, sustained, and operated in contested environments using warfighters rather than engineers or test pilots. A key highlight of the exercise was the use of Anduril's Menace-T command and control system, which allowed operators to run missions from a simulated forward operating base without reliance on large, established base infrastructure, aligning with the Air Force's Agile Combat Employment concepts. The exercise served as a practical demonstration of the Air Force's Warfighting Acquisition System framework, which aims to accelerate fielding by integrating operator feedback early in development, with the CCA program acting as a pathfinder for this broader acquisition transformation. The Air Force has not yet decided whether it will procure one or both Increment 1 CCA designs — the YFQ-44 Fury and General Atomics' YFQ-42A Dark Merlin — at full scale.