Saab just pulled the sheet off its A3 collaborative combat aircraft concept, and the defense world is doing what it always does: drooling over the specs of a high-end, exquisite machine.
But if you look at the actual wars being fought right now, the truth is ugly. The major change in battles over the last decade hasn’t been sleek AI wingmen. It’s been flooding the zone with cheap, micro-to-small drones that cost less than a set of night-vision goggles.
If your autonomous wingman costs as much as a house, you aren’t going to let it take a bullet. And if it won’t take a bullet, it isn’t a wingman—it’s just a very expensive liability.
The defense industry is obsessed with the word “collaborative.” It paints a picture of a manned fighter flying alongside a sleek, autonomous jet, sharing targeting data and executing complex maneuvers. It sounds beautiful. It sounds expensive. And it completely misses the point of modern warfare.
Look at the battlefields of today. The sky isn’t filled with high-end collaborative jets. It’s filled with thousands of FPV drones. It’s filled with unglamorous, replaceable hardware that gets blown up on purpose.
Even the commenters on Saab’s announcement get the joke. While the press releases talk about “high-end concepts,” the actual people paying attention are joking about how Saab “should’ve made nice cars instead” or asking for a “2-door 900 turbo revival.” There’s a dark gallows humor there. We are building million-dollar prestige machines to fight a war that is being won by $500 plastic drones.
The defense industry doesn’t have a technology problem; it has a cost-curve problem.
You can’t build a collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) if your entire business model relies on making things un-expendable. The traditional aerospace primes are trapped by their own expensive instincts. They want to build the A3. They want to build the epic aircraft. But epic doesn’t survive a swarm.
The paradox of the CCA race is that true collaboration requires expendability. You can’t distribute your forces if losing one breaks the budget. You can’t take risks with an AI wingman if the brass is terrified of seeing it on CNN getting shot down.
True collaboration in modern combat isn’t about machines sharing data. It’s about generals sharing the cost of losing them.
Saab’s A3 concept is undeniably cool. But “cool” is a peacetime luxury. The long-term winner of the autonomous aircraft race won’t be the player that builds the most capable jet. It will be the player ruthless enough to build a platform cheap enough to throw away. Until the primes accept that their “high-end” concepts are the very thing preventing them from surviving, they’re just building expensive targets.
FAQ
Q: Isn't high-end AI necessary to penetrate advanced air defenses?
A: Yes, but if you can't afford to lose them, you won't send them in the numbers required to overwhelm those defenses. One smart drone gets shot down just as easily as a dumb one if it's flying alone.
Q: What does this mean for defense contractors?
A: Their margins are about to collapse. They have to shift from selling dozens of exquisite, billion-dollar platforms to selling thousands of cheap, mass-produced ones. The traditional aerospace business model is fundamentally broken.
Q: So we should just build cheap garbage?
A: No, you build 'smart-enough,' not perfect. You build a system that is 80% as capable as the high-end jet but 5% of the cost. The goal is overwhelming mass, not pristine perfection.