(Tribune News Service) — The Air Force is reorganizing to fight a new kind of war and that was apparent as the Life Cycle Industry Days annual convention uniting the defense industry and those charged with keeping the Air Force flying launched in downtown Dayton on Monday.

“This is an historic time,” said Brig Gen. Jason E. Bartolomei, commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. “It’s serious.”

Drawn by what Jeff Hoagland, the Dayton Development Coalition’s president and chief executive, called an “amazing agenda,” those attending the three-day event at the Dayton Convention Center that ends today from the Air Force and private industry discussed service needs and industry capabilities at a time when the Air Force is preparing to face China and Russia as its chief adversaries.

That reorganization — or “reoptimization,” as Air Force leaders call it — has implications for Wright-Patterson and the Dayton area.

While the details are still being drafted, it’s expected that reoptimization will entail having the huge Air Force Materiel Command — the Wright-Patterson-based command that oversees 89,000 people worldwide and $72 billion of budget authority — will work with a new Integrated Development Office. The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center (also anchored at Wright-Patt) will become the Air Force Air Dominance Systems Center, among many other changes.

What won’t change are military-industry partnerships, said Lt. Gen. Donna Shipton, who commands the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center (AFLCMC).

“We expect our partnerships to remain strong and continue to grow,” she said.

Among those partnerships: Brig Gen. Jason Voorheis, the program executive officer for Fighters and Advanced Aircraft at AFLCMC, told reporters Monday that five companies have been awarded contracts to oversee the autonomy software of one of the Air Force’s biggest projects, the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program.

The CCA will be an uncrewed drone flying with the F-35 and the Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter, not only flying autonomously, but eventually contributing to battle success autonomously.

While the Air Force in April awarded contracts to Anduril and General Atomics for the air vehicle portion of the project in April, the identities of the five companies working on the CCA’s autonomy software is classified.

The autonomy aspect — or “the brains” as Col Timothy Helfrich, the division chief for the Agile Development Office, called it — is seen as the CCA’s most challenging aspect.

“The U.S. Air Force has a tremendous amount of experience with flight autonomy,” Voorheis said. “There’s nothing cosmic or new there. What’s new is more the mission autonomy. So we’re moving forward with the CCA program in a way that starts with what we know and builds over time to more and more capable mission autonomy.”

Some 350 people at Wright-Patterson work on the CCA program. The base overall is home of more than 35,000 military and civilian employees, the largest single-site concentration of employment in Ohio.

The Air Force is committed to flying the CCA by the end of the decade. The idea is to have at least 1,000 CCAs, offering what Air Force leaders hope will be expanded fighter capacity at lower costs.

“The CCA is moving out with urgency,” Voorheis said.

More than 2,600 people are attending the three-day event at the remodeled Dayton Convention Center, an attendance record, easily besting last year’s attendance figure of about 1,700 people.

Probably 400 registrants were turned away, Hoagland said. (c)2024 the Dayton Daily News (Dayton, Ohio)

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