Air Force Seeks Target Drones Mimicking Stealth Fighters and Bombers; RFI Due Sept. 28
The timing—issued amid active Middle East operations and after the Raytheon Tomahawk surge contract (August 17, $22.9B for 1,000 missiles annually)—suggests ACC is planning for sustained high-tempo training cycles to match the munitions production ramp. If target drones remain subscale and expensive, training pipeline throughput becomes the binding constraint on pilot readiness for saturation scenarios.
A commercial solution at $5-15M per airframe, expended at scale, would unlock training capacity that legacy systems cannot deliver. The second move: if the Air Force succeeds in acquiring inexpensive, attritable targets, it inverts the traditional calculus where target drone scarcity forced training compromises.
Air Combat Command faces a critical fidelity gap: the BQM-167A subscale drone cannot simulate a J-20 or H-6, and the QF-16 full-scale surrogate is too expensive to expend in quantity.
This RFI exposes a bottleneck in adversary-representative training that has persisted since 2007, and the September 28 deadline signals ACC expects industry to close it within 12 months. Watch whether the winning contractor opts for modular drone families (lower cost per unit, higher production volume) or single-platform solutions with swappable performance modules—the choice determines whether the Air Force can afford to treat these targets as truly attritable or will revert to cost-conscious conservation.
Does the RFI specify a target production rate or inventory requirement, or is the 'attritable' language aspirational without a unit cost ceiling?
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