Open-source intelligence on Brontanax, briefed every Wednesday.
A long-form open-source brief on the UK's Collaborative Combat Aircraft programme, emailed to subscribers once a week on Wednesdays while new information on the programme remains scarce, plus a rotating long-form feature on the wider drone-warfare story — from Ukraine to the Pacific to the ethics of autonomous combat air.
Attritable, not expendable: how the RAF will account for losses.
The word attached to CCAs across every Western air force is "attritable", and it is doing an enormous amount of work. It sits between expendable, which means the aircraft is consumed on use, and exquisite, which means each loss is a national event. Where exactly Brontanax lands on that spectrum will shape how commanders actually use it — and no cost figure alone answers the question.
An aircraft at 20 to 25 per cent of a Typhoon's cost is not cheap in absolute terms. Losing one is a real financial event, and the institutional instinct of any air force is to protect assets it cannot quickly replace. If production rates are low and the fleet is small, commanders will husband Brontanax exactly as they husband crewed jets, and the tactical advantage of uncrewed mass evaporates.
That is why production capacity, not unit price, is the variable that determines attritability in practice. An aircraft that can be replaced within months is one a commander will risk on a defence-suppression run into a heavily defended corridor. An aircraft with a three-year replacement lead time is one that gets held back for lower-risk tasks, which is the opposite of the concept.
There are second-order effects too. Accident and loss reporting for uncrewed aircraft, the political handling of a Brontanax lost over hostile territory with sensitive autonomy software aboard, and the rules for self-destruct or data sanitisation are all policy questions with no established British precedent. Each one influences whether commanders feel free to use the aircraft as intended.
The test will come the first time one is lost in training. How the RAF and the MoD publicly frame that event — routine consumption of an attritable asset, or an incident requiring an inquiry — will tell us more about the true doctrine than any capability brochure.
Briefs are editorial analysis, not BAE Systems or MoD statements. New editions are emailed to subscribers weekly, every Wednesday.
Read every previous brief in the archiveWhy the CCA race is really a manufacturing race.
The public conversation about Collaborative Combat Aircraft focuses on airframes, autonomy and teaming concepts. The private conversation inside defence ministries and prime contractors focuses on something less glamorous and more decisive: manufacturing capacity. Whichever country can build these aircraft at scale, sustainably, at the promised cost, wins the CCA race regardless of whose demonstrator flies first or performs best in a scripted exercise.
The reason is arithmetic. A CCA is only useful as an operational concept if the fielded fleet is large enough to constitute mass — several hundred airframes for a medium-sized air force, several thousand across NATO. Traditional Western combat aircraft production lines, optimised for low-rate builds of exquisite airframes, cannot deliver those numbers on any reasonable timescale. The manufacturing model has to change.
The US programmes are betting heavily on new industrial approaches. Anduril's proposition, in particular, is explicitly built around software-defined manufacturing, digital engineering and a supply chain deliberately drawn from outside the traditional primes. Whether that model delivers airframes at the promised rate is not yet proven, but the ambition is unmistakable. General Atomics, coming from a decades-long unmanned aircraft production heritage, is betting on a more evolutionary approach.
BAE Systems' approach with Brontanax is a hybrid. The company retains a deep traditional combat-aircraft manufacturing base at Warton, with the skills and certifications required for rapid, high-quality build. It is layering on top of that the digital engineering and rapid-iteration methods that FalconWorks has been developing. The bet is that combining the two produces a manufacturing capability that neither pure-play new entrants nor pure-play legacy primes can match on cost and pace together.
The test will come between 2027 and 2030. If BAE can move from demonstrator to initial production tranche without the delays that have historically plagued UK combat-air programmes, and if the promised cost curve holds through that transition, the manufacturing bet will have paid off. If the transition looks like a traditional Typhoon or Hawk production ramp, Brontanax will remain technically credible but commercially uncompetitive against the US industrial base. The airframe is the visible part. The factory is the decisive one.
Feature essays step back from the day-to-day Brontanax story to examine the wider evolution of drone warfare — the lessons of Ukraine, the shape of the next decade, the industrial base, doctrine, geopolitics and ethics. A new feature rotates in every few days.
The reveal, as it was reported.
A fixed record of the original open-source reporting from the Farnborough International Airshow reveal on 22 July 2026. These dates are the publication dates of the source articles and do not change; day-to-day analysis appears in the daily brief above and in the brief archive.
- 22 Jul 2026BAE Systems unveils Brontanax at Farnborough
The first British-designed Collaborative Combat Aircraft is revealed at FIA 2026, with Defence Secretary Wes Streeting confirming £300m for the StormFighter programme.
BAE Systems press release - 22 Jul 2026"Similar to a Hawk trainer" — first look at the airframe
The Aviationist walks the Farnborough model: low-observable delta, canted twin tails, single engine and a belly-mounted intake below the nose.
The Aviationist - 22 Jul 2026First flight targeted for second half of 2027
Shephard Media reports the BAE timeline — power-on Q3 2026, ground trials H1 2027, first flight H2 2027 in step with NATO Steadfast Defender 27.
Shephard Media - 22 Jul 2026Royal Navy angle: Brontanax off a Queen Elizabeth-class carrier
Naval News flags a BAE promo clip showing a Brontanax launching from a UK carrier, hinting at a Project Vanquish tie-in even though the MoD brief is RAF-focused.
Naval News - 22 Jul 2026RAF names its autonomous fighter effort "StormFighter"
Forces News confirms the RAF's CCA programme has been formally rebranded StormFighter, absorbing lessons from the cancelled Project Mosquito.
Forces News - 22 Jul 2026Breaking Defense: a UK-designed CCA, at last
Analysis of how Brontanax lands relative to the US Increment 1 CCA fielded by General Atomics and Anduril, and Australia's MQ-28 Ghost Bat.
Breaking Defense
