Northrop Grumman announced on January 8, 2026, that it has won the U.S. Marine Corps’ Marine Air-Ground Task Force Uncrewed Expeditionary Tactical Aircraft (MUX TACAIR) Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) contract, teaming with Kratos Defense to deliver a Marine-tailored variant of the XQ-58 Valkyrie. Structured as an Other Transaction Agreement (OTA) valued at approximately $231.5 million over a 24-month period, the award signals a deliberate shift away from traditional, requirements-heavy acquisition toward rapid prototyping, operational experimentation, and near-term field relevance.
Under the agreement, Northrop Grumman will provide mission systems integration and its open-architecture Prism autonomy software, while Kratos supplies a Valkyrie variant adapted for expeditionary Marine Corps operations and scalable production. Both companies emphasize that the effort is not a technology demonstrator, but a path toward operationally useful uncrewed combat aviation aligned with how the Marine Corps expects to fight in contested environments.
The use of an OTA reflects a growing Pentagon preference for speed and flexibility in emerging capability areas such as uncrewed combat aircraft. Rather than locking industry and the service into a rigid set of specifications early on, the MUX TACAIR CCA program is designed to mature through experimentation with Marines in the loop, allowing tactics, payloads, and autonomy behaviors to evolve alongside operational concepts.
For the Marine Corps, the timing is significant. The service is deep into Force Design 2030, a restructuring effort that prioritizes distributed operations, expeditionary basing, and survivability in the face of advanced missile, air defense, and electronic warfare threats. In this context, CCA is not positioned as a single exquisite drone, but as a combat system built around numbers, dispersion, and adaptability.
Marine aviation leaders have consistently argued that future air dominance will depend less on individual platform performance and more on how well manned and uncrewed systems operate together. The Valkyrie-based CCA is intended to push sensors and effects forward, absorb risk, and force adversaries to expend high-end interceptors and radar resources on assets that are deliberately attritable.
Kratos’ XQ-58 Valkyrie brings a relatively mature air vehicle to the program. Developed as a clean-sheet collaborative combat aircraft design, the Valkyrie has already completed multiple flight demonstrations, validating its basic aerodynamics, propulsion, and control systems. The aircraft occupies a compact, stealth-leaning design space optimized for stand-in operations rather than short-range orbiting missions.
According to Kratos, the Valkyrie offers a range in excess of 3,000 nautical miles, cruise speeds approaching Mach 0.86, and operating altitudes up to 45,000 feet. With a maximum takeoff weight of roughly 6,000 pounds, it sits well below traditional crewed fighters in size and cost, yet large enough to carry meaningful sensor and weapons payloads. This combination makes it suitable for operating ahead of manned formations in contested airspace, where endurance and reach are as important as survivability.
One of the most consequential aspects of the Marine Corps variant is its approach to launch and recovery. The original Valkyrie concept emphasized runway independence, using rocket-assisted takeoff from a static launcher and recovery by parachute with airbags. This model aligns closely with Marine expeditionary doctrine, which seeks to minimize dependence on fixed infrastructure that can be targeted early in a conflict.
For MUX TACAIR, the Marine-focused configuration adds a conventional takeoff and landing (CTOL) capability with fixed landing gear. Crucially, however, it retains compatibility with the booster-assisted static launch system. This hybrid approach allows Marines to tailor operations to the environment: launching from austere forward sites when runways are unavailable or threatened, and recovering conventionally where airstrips exist to enable faster turnarounds and higher sortie rates.
In the Indo-Pacific theater, where distances are vast and airfields are both scarce and vulnerable, this flexibility directly enhances operational credibility. By dispersing launch locations and reducing predictability, Marine CCAs complicate adversary targeting and increase the resilience of the overall air campaign.
Armament and payload flexibility are central to the Valkyrie’s transition from a flying sensor to a true force multiplier. While specific loadouts under the Marine Corps contract have not been disclosed, the air vehicle is designed to carry both kinetic and non-kinetic payloads via an internal weapons bay and external wing stations.
The internal bay supports compact precision-guided munitions, loitering weapons, or air-launched decoys, enabling the aircraft to preserve a reduced radar cross section during the most threatening phases of a mission. External hardpoints provide additional capacity for electronic attack pods, sensors, or auxiliary effectors once survivability tradeoffs are acceptable.
This modular architecture allows commanders to configure each sortie based on mission objectives and threat conditions. A Valkyrie might fly one mission as a passive sensor and decoy, another as an electronic attack platform, and a third as a weapons carrier extending the magazine depth of a manned formation.
Northrop Grumman’s contribution centers on mission systems integration and its Prism autonomy software, which serves as the digital backbone of the CCA concept. Rather than relying on continuous remote piloting, the autonomy stack is designed to manage flight operations, sensor employment, and mission execution with minimal human input.
In practice, this shifts the role of the human pilot from hands-on control to tasking and supervision. A single pilot in an F-35B, for example, could direct multiple Valkyries to scout specific areas, hold at designated waypoints, or execute coordinated electronic attack, while retaining authority over weapons employment under predefined rules.
Such autonomy enables behaviors that would be impractical with traditional remotely piloted aircraft, including dynamic route planning around threat emitters, synchronized sensing to build a common operating picture, and timed effects designed to overwhelm or confuse integrated air defense systems. The result is a team of aircraft acting as a coherent combat system rather than a collection of individual platforms.
The Valkyrie-based CCA is optimized to operate alongside the Marine Corps’ F-35B short takeoff and vertical landing fighter, with clear applicability to Navy F-35C operations and relevance to legacy aircraft while they remain in service. In teamed operations, Valkyries can operate forward as sensors, decoys, or weapons carriers, extending the reach and survivability of the manned force.
By pushing attritable assets ahead of the formation, Marine pilots can provoke enemy radar activation, draw missile launches, and expose air defense nodes without placing a high-value crewed aircraft in the densest threat envelope. This approach is particularly valuable in the opening stages of a high-end conflict, where uncertainty is greatest and the defender often enjoys the advantage of prepared positions.
Strategically, the MUX TACAIR CCA program reflects a broader U.S. effort to adapt airpower to competition with near-peer adversaries. By trading relatively low-cost uncrewed aircraft for information, targeting data, and early effects, the Marine Corps can compress an adversary’s decision cycle and degrade defenses more rapidly.
The combination of a modular airframe, flexible basing concept, and open autonomy architecture also supports rapid iteration as threats evolve. New sensors, payloads, or autonomy behaviors can be integrated without redesigning the entire platform, while cost-conscious design principles enable employment at scale rather than in token numbers.
If fielded in meaningful quantities, Valkyrie-based CCAs could give the Marine Corps a practical means to extend F-35-led airpower, complicate adversary planning, and preserve manned aircraft for missions where human judgment and adaptability remain indispensable. The January 8 announcement suggests that, for Marine aviation, uncrewed combat aircraft are no longer a distant aspiration but an emerging operational reality.
