It’s easy to see why. These uncrewed, autonomous or semi-autonomous aircraft are designed to operate alongside crewed fighter aircraft, launching from airfields and ships, offering greater combat mass, operational flexibility and improved survivability in contested environments.
That’s why the 2025 UK Strategic Defence Review directed investment in ACPs as part of the Future Combat Air System (FCAS), and the recently published 2026 Defence Investment Plan (DIP) includes a dedicated CCA programme to develop autonomous wingmen for Typhoon, F-35, and beyond.
Furthermore, the Royal Air Force's (RAF) first ACP entered operational service with 216 Squadron on 2 May 2025 in the form of StormShroud, which is equipped with Leonardo’s advanced electronic warfare (EW) payload, BriteStorm.
But with clear sovereign intent to produce and operate these platforms en masse, a fleet of ACPs will only be as effective as the breadth of missions they can perform. That breadth depends almost entirely on what each airframe carries, such as EW capabilities, sensors, communications systems and other payloads.
A century of electronics heritage adapted for modern-day combat
Leonardo’s heritage in defence electronics, specifically EW, spans more than a century, with the company playing a critical role in the research, development, production and deployment of a full stack of products, including mission systems, sensors and information advantage capabilities.
The same expertise that has shaped a century of world-leading EW innovation is now delivering some of the sector’s newest technology, including the BriteStorm stand-in jammer and BriteCloud expendable active decoy currently fielded on platforms on both sides of the Atlantic. Both are evidence that the company can move at both evolutionary and revolutionary paces, adapting proven capabilities to new platforms and roles as quickly as the market and battlespace demands.
The company is also a leading partner in the GCAP Electronics Evolution (G2E), the industry consortium responsible for delivering the integrated sensing and non-kinetic effects, as well as the integrated communications systems at the heart of the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP), reflecting the expertise and leadership in sixth-generation electronics, as well as the level of trust and technical depth the company has established across the sector.
That sovereignty extends beyond technology: Leonardo’s UK workforce and operations are spread across the country, supported by a wide network of UK-based SMEs and bolstered by the company’s SME Partnership Programme, embedding Leonardo firmly within the country’s industrial base.
It’s this blend of heritage, expertise, industrial authority and active involvement in advanced technology that positions the company as an authoritative tier-one supplier of payloads and open digital architectures for current and future ACPs and CCAs.
Platform agnostic by design: Supporting every platform and every mission
Each nation has its own operational requirements, with differing aircraft fleets and strategic and tactical priorities.
This means the Collaborative Combat Aircraft supporting these aircraft must be adaptable and capable of performing a range of mission-critical tasks, including strike, EW, ISR and early warning.
To do that, the architecture within them needs to be equally adaptable, which is why all of Leonardo’s CCA-optimised systems are fully platform agnostic. The company can support multiple platforms, mission profiles and customer needs by adapting a range of capabilities for CCA roles, including radars, sensors, laser target designators, seekers and communications systems.
Not only are the systems adaptable, but so are Leonardo’s processes. The company’s experts can either create digital architecture to meet predefined customer and operational requirements, or, in a fully collaborative partnership, use their internal operational analysis tools and in-house synthetic environments to shape the requirements from scratch with the customer.
Connecting sensors, effectors and decision-makers – from Federated to Integrated Systems
Leonardo’s approach to this market is not just limited to physical payloads. Whatever their form, Collaborative Combat Aircraft will need to operate within a wider digital ecosystem in which sensors, effectors, and decision makers can share information quickly, accurately and securely.
To maximise the effectiveness of onboard sensors, Leonardo draws upon its extensive knowledge and experience in mission data support, including critical work on the RAF’s Typhoon, Chinook and Rivet Joint fleets. That support wrapper can help operators adapt more quickly across the mission cycle as threats, tasks and environments evolve.
In addition, there is a need for secure, reliable connectivity in contested or degraded environments, where a CCA may lose access to certain communications channels such as satellite communications (SATCOM), for example.
This is where Leonardo’s extensive work and reputation as an industry leader in information advantage (IA) comes to the fore. The company’s experts take a strategic approach to keeping every asset – whether human or technological – connected, by designing the sensor-decider-effector chain as a whole, rather than considering each part separately and then working out how they link afterwards.
Bringing this all together is now one of our main efforts. We will continue to supply world-class sensing, effecting and communications payloads into systems across all domains. However, and crucially, through our R&D we will deliver seamless integrated systems that are more capable than the sum of their parts, through sensor fusion, mission systems autonomy and open architectures to ensure we continue to deliver the user the critical Decision Superiority they require, and which contemporary operations demand.
In the case of lost SATCOM, rather than losing the wider picture entirely, this approach allows the customer to draw on whichever nodes remain available, showing operators the capabilities they still have and updating as assets come back online. This draws on critical work carried out by Leonardo for its IA offering, which aims to connect sensors, effectors, autonomy and decision-makers into an open, modular ecosystem.
Adapting existing capabilities for emerging CCA requirements
The Collaborative Combat Aircraft market is still forming, and requirements will continue to evolve. The CCAs of the late 2020s will look very different from those of 2030.
But in the UK, Leonardo is getting ahead of the game. The company’s experts have been investing time establishing a two-way feedback loop with Air and Maritime customers, working directly with end users to understand their likely use cases for CCAs and gathering feedback from those on the ground, while simultaneously exploring existing capabilities, novel concepts of operation and constraints, and testing them in representative synthetic and live environments.
This is helping accelerate development, enabling experts to proactively find solutions to a key challenge already identified in the CCA market: size, weight, and power (SWaP).
Once again, Leonardo’s UK heritage will be crucial to solving this problem. Reducing SWaP, while maintaining world-class capability, has long been a natural evolutionary trend across the company’s portfolio. That experience – including managing the distinct challenges of miniaturisation – gives the company a solid foundation for adapting its capabilities to CCA-scale requirements.
A trusted partner for the CCA market
As the UK and other nations look to expand their Collaborative Combat Aircraft fleets, the digital architecture embedded in those aircraft will become as critical as the airframes themselves. That is because true mission advantage will not come from the airframe alone; principally, it will stem from the systems, data and integration within it.
Leonardo is well placed to deliver that architecture. It brings proven mission-system heritage and UK sovereign capability, along with the flexibility to support a range of platforms, roles and customer requirements as they emerge.
As the CCA market matures, it will be this combination – proven open-architecture systems, sovereign delivery and the ability to adapt at pace – that will determine whether a platform, and more importantly, the connected system in which it operates, can deliver genuine operational advantage.
