Air Force Issues RFI for Expendable Target Drone Family to Mimic Stealth Fighters and UAV Swarms

The U.S. Air Force is looking to completely overhaul how it tests air-to-air weapons and sensors — and the effort starts at the target range. A new Request for Information (RFI) issued this month calls for a family of expendable aerial targets capable of replicating threats ranging from small quadcopter drones to fifth-generation stealth fighters, strategic bombers, and large uncrewed aircraft.

The requirement, published on SAM.gov and reported by The War Zone, reflects a long-standing gap in the Air Force's test infrastructure: its current target inventory cannot adequately simulate the full spectrum of modern airborne threats. The service is now openly inviting commercial, dual-use, and non-traditional defense solutions to fill that gap — with responses due September 28.

Why Existing Targets Fall Short

The Air Force operates two broad classes of aerial targets today. The subsonic BQM-167A Subscale Aerial Target, in service since 2007, is inexpensive but physically tiny compared to actual fighter aircraft — it measures roughly 20 feet with an 11-foot wingspan. At the other end of the scale, converted QF-16 full-scale aerial targets provide genuine fighter-like performance but cost nearly as much as the aircraft being tested and cannot be expended in large numbers.

Neither system handles the realities of modern warfare particularly well. A QF-16 is useful for simulating fourth-generation fighter threats, but it cannot replicate the low-observable radar signatures, multispectral infrared profiles, or integrated electronic warfare capabilities of fifth-generation aircraft like the F-35 or J-20. It also cannot come close to representing the physical volume and signature complexity of a strategic bomber or an airborne early warning and control (AEW&C) platform like China's KJ-3000.

What the Air Force Wants

The RFI breaks the requirement into multiple tiers. For advanced fighter aircraft, targets must be capable of supersonic flight up to and exceeding Mach 1.6 at 40,000 feet, high-G combat maneuvering, precise low-observable radar cross-section profiles, multispectral infrared signatures, active radio-frequency emissions, and integrated electronic attack capabilities. For C-130-sized multi-engine aircraft, the focus shifts to matching physical scale, subsonic flight envelopes, and realistic radar and infrared returns — specifically to assess missile seeker guidance and warhead lethality against large airframes.

At the high end, the service wants targets that can reproduce the dimensions, thermal signatures, and radar presentation of strategic bombers and AEW&C aircraft. At the low end, the requirement includes Group 1 and Group 2 drones flying below 150 knots and capable of swarm operations — reflecting the growing threat from massed inexpensive UAS.

Group 5 UAV targets would need to operate at altitudes up to 50,000 feet, while Group 3 and Group 4 targets would fly at approximately Mach 0.5 to 0.8 and maneuver at between 3 and 6 Gs.

Commercial Solutions Welcome

Perhaps most significantly, the RFI explicitly invites non-traditional bidders. The document calls for proposals including "commercial, modified commercial, dual-use, and non-developmental solutions" and states the government is "particularly interested in non-traditional, commercially derived, or dual-use solutions" that can offer advantages in cost, scalability, and simplicity over legacy systems.

That language suggests the Air Force is not looking for another clean-sheet, program-of-record aircraft. Instead, it wants industry to find commercially available components, manufacturing methods, and propulsion systems that can be adapted into high-fidelity threat representatives at a fraction of the cost of current options.

What This Means for the靶场 and Beyond

The goal is a target that can be treated as attritable — meaning it can be destroyed during testing without the kind of cost friction that currently limits how aggressively the Air Force can exercise its weapons and sensors. A target fleet that costs nearly as much as the missile being tested limits the number of realistic engagement scenarios warfighters can run. Cheap, high-fidelity targets would allow for repeated, large-scale test events that better reflect actual combat conditions.

If successful, the resulting family of drones could also support development and evaluation of radars, infrared sensors, electronic warfare systems, and air defense networks against a far broader range of realistic airborne threats than anything currently in the inventory. The same platform family could simulate large numbers of future Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCAs) and massed small drone swarms alongside more traditional fighter and bomber profiles.

The Air Force has attempted similar acquisitions before — notably the 5th Generation Aerial Target (5GAT) program — but progress has been limited. Whether this RFI produces a different outcome will depend on whether industry can actually deliver the intersection of high-fidelity threat representation and mass-producible affordability that has eluded previous efforts.

Source: The War Zone

Sources: The War Zone