(DCNF)—The U.S. Air Force is pushing the envelope on AI-based weapons with new unmanned fighter jets.
The Air Force announced that it selected the winners of contracts for the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, responsible for producing software and hardware to push the AI revolution from the ground and into the sky with new airframes, in a press release on Wednesday. The initiative is being unveiled as the U.S. engages in an AI arms race with China.
One AI-piloted prototype aircraft is the FQ-42, made by General Atomics. A General Atomics spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation that drones are its bread and butter.
“Twenty-five years ago, General Atomics changed combat forever by pioneering missiles launched from MQ-1 Predators,” Mark Brinkley, a General Atomics spokesman, told the DCNF. “No other nation had that capability. Almost 10 million flight hours later, we’re changing combat again with CCA [Collaborative Combat Aircraft]. Unmanned aircraft is all we do, and we do it extremely well.”
Some experts have raised concerns about the ethics of having machines use lethal force on human beings.
“Humans should be in the loop when use of kinetic force is in play. AQI can really help process mass quantities of data, help see patterns,” Douglas Birkey, executive director of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, told the DCNF. “But the ultimate decision to employ a missile or shoot should involve a trained person—their judgment is crucial.”
“Weapons systems that select and engage targets without meaningful human control are unacceptable and need to be prevented,” Human Rights Watch, an international human rights advocacy group, warned on Aug. 10, 2020.
The U.S. Air Force did not comment in time for publication.
General Atomics said that these jets were already on the production line before the company was awarded the contract, which is funded by the U.S. defense budget.
“For CCA, we were already building aircraft ahead of contract award. Those jets are in the pipeline, suppliers have contracts, and work is underway already,” Brinkley told the DCNF. “We build a lot of things at risk, ahead of contracts, to save time for our customers and keep programs on track. We don’t have a scaling issue that you might associate with a new program or a startup company, because we’ve been doing this a long time. We have capacity and we forecast really well. So by having General Atomics in the mix, America gets a stable, nontraditional defense business but also gets real experience.”
Proponents of AI-piloted aircraft in military applications say this new initiative could actually end up saving the U.S. Air Force money in the long run.
“CCA can help commanders generate more options to sense and engage threats,” senior fellow at Hudson Institute Timothy Walton told the DCNF. “Additionally, they should have significantly lower operations and support costs compared to crewed fighters.”
General Atomics’ FQ-42 may be powered by software from Collins Aerospace, showing how intercompany cooperation is a key aspect of the new CCA initiative.
“Collins Aerospace, an RTX business, has been awarded a production contract by the U.S. Air Force to supply our Sidekick Collaborative Mission Autonomy software for the CCA Increment 1 program,” an RTX Corp. spokesperson told the DCNF. “We’re supporting integration and testing on General Atomics’ FQ-42A platform today”
“Separating mission autonomy from aircraft hardware not only helps prevent contractor lock-in, but also speeds development and iteration of both mission autonomy software and aircraft hardware,” Walton told the DCNF.
Anduril, an AI-focused weapons manufacturer, was awarded a contract to “deliver an initial set of production FQ-44 semi-autonomous fighter aircraft.”
The FQ-44’s development has an emphasis on mass production, Anduril said in a blog post announcing the contract.
“A handful of aircraft will not move the needle in a great power conflict. From the design of the aircraft itself to the production system that will deliver it, we have maintained a relentless focus on the need to deliver at scale,” Anduril Vice President Mark Shushnar wrote in the blog post. “The production line at Arsenal-1 is already on this path: work there is active today, and the production line itself is capable of delivering up to 150 aircraft per year in its current configuration … [Anduril can] scale it further to meet additional surges in demand.”
Not everyone is excited about what this means for the future.
“I agree with the large number of experts that have recommended the prohibition of lethal autonomous weapons without human control,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said on July 18, 2023, during remarks to the U.N. Security Council on Artificial Intelligence.
Human Rights Watch also asked British computer scientist Stuart Russell to support a ban on AI weapons in 2022.
Hardware Isn’t Everything
Although it is some awesome eye candy to look at, hardware is only half the battle when it comes to AI-piloted combat aircraft.
Anduril was awarded a contract as one of the key developers to push “Mission Autonomy” into the U.S. Air Force. In this case, mission autonomy means the ability to operate independently from humans in the event that electronic warfare jams communications with the aircraft.
“Anduril has worked toward sophisticated Mission Autonomy from the early days of the company,” Vice President of Engineering Vik Pattabi wrote in a blog on Wednesday. “Our experience on these programs created the foundational understanding required for us to take on a particularly advanced, complex, and high-stakes mission set: enabling a single human operator to interact and fight with a team of Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA).”
Anduril is not the only provider of AI-powered combat in the new CCA contract awards. Shield AI was also named among the contractors that will be building out the AI ecosystem in the U.S. Air Force.
Shield AI said Hivemind, its AI program, will be able to make decisions on its own.
“Hivemind is Shield AI’s … software that assumes the role of a human pilot or operator, enabling unmanned systems to sense, decide, and act,” Shield AI said in a statement provided to the DCNF. “Unlike traditional autopilots that simply follow preplanned routes, Hivemind can reroute around or engage dynamic obstacles, execute collaborative tactics with peer systems and piloted aircraft, respond to unexpected conditions, and complete missions safely and effectively as part of a human-machine team.”
With the award of these contracts, only one thing is certain: air combat is rapidly changing.
“The advantage is that crewed and uncrewed aircraft each have respective strengths and weaknesses,” Birkey told the DCNF. “Combining them allows for the strengths of one to cover for the weaknesses of the other. We saw a basic form of this during Operation Epic Fury, when uninhabited MQ-9s were put into threat zones where we did not want to put crewed aircraft at risk.”
While these new developments may save money for the U.S. military, the question of whether we should allow AI weapon development to continue remains unanswered.
At the outset of the Iran War, the U.S. military struck an Iranian girl’s school that killed at least 175 people, many of whom were schoolgirls, The New York Times reported. A final investigation into the incident has yet to be released and it remains unclear if AI was utilized at all in the strike. But a preliminary investigation found that “outdated” data led to the school being mistakenly targeted.
“Was there an AI program that targeted this school that thought it was something else? ” conservative commentator Tucker Carlson asked on “The Tucker Carlson Show” on March 9, 2026.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.