The Air Force just published its shopping list of threat signatures it wants to shoot at cheaply

The U.S. Air Force is asking companies to propose a family of low-cost aerial targets that can imitate threats ranging from hobbyist quadcopters and drone swarms to stealth fighters, strategic bombers and airborne early warning aircraft ^[1]. Responses to the request for information are due September 28, and the document is more valuable to suppliers as a signature specification than as a purchase order: it lists, class by class, what the service now needs to destroy repeatedly without writing off something expensive each time ^[2][6].

The stated test uses are air-to-air weapons, missile seekers, electronic warfare and warhead effectiveness ^[3]. The notice says the targets should "represent the full range of airborne threats, spanning from inexpensive 'hobby drones' to the most advanced adversary fighter and large-scale aircraft" ^[4]. At the top end, the RFI asks for "supersonic capabilities (up to and exceeding Mach 1.6 at 40,000 feet), high-agility/high-G combat maneuvers, precise low-observable Radar Cross-section (RCS) profiles, multi-spectral Infrared (IR) signatures, active RF emissions, and integrated Electronic Attack (EA) capabilities" ^[5]. That is a fighter surrogate that has to be credible to a seeker, an infrared sensor and an RF receiver at once, and cheap enough to be "treated as attritable or expendable when required" ^[5][6].

The rest of the family trades speed for volume. A C-130-sized target would prioritize physical scale, slow subsonic flight and multiengine propulsion characteristics ^[8]. Bomber and AWACS surrogates would have to reproduce large dimensions, thermal profiles and heavy-aircraft radar signatures ^[9], with the point being to check whether seekers can track big aircraft and whether warheads do enough damage ^[10]. Group 5 targets must reach 50,000 feet; Group 3 and Group 4 targets should fly between Mach 0.5 and Mach 0.8 and pull 3 to 6 Gs; Group 1 and Group 2 targets stay below 150 knots and support swarm missions ^[11][12]. Counting the classes described, that is at least six distinct product lines under one solicitation, with a speed envelope running from under 150 knots to above Mach 1.6 ^[16][17].

The gap being filled is concrete. The BQM-167A subscale target has been in service since 2007, and at roughly 20 feet long with an 11-foot wingspan it cannot physically stand in for larger aircraft such as China's J-20 or H-6 ^[13]. QF-16s converted from retired fighters give a full-scale fourth-generation target, but were not built to reproduce fifth-generation stealth characteristics or large bombers and support aircraft, and are too valuable to destroy routinely in numbers ^[14]. So the Pentagon is pointing at "commercial, modified commercial, dual-use, and non-developmental solutions" ^[15], and the RFI says the government is "particularly interested in non-traditional, commercially derived, or dual-use solutions that offer advantages in cost, scalability, and simplicity over legacy systems" [c15a].

Two tensions are worth tracking past September 28. Low-observable RCS shaping, multi-spectral IR and integrated electronic attack are the parts of the stack least likely to arrive from a commercially derived airframe, so the high end and the swarm end may end up with entirely different bidder pools even though they are described in one notice ^[5][11][15]. And no unit cost figures appear in the reported requirements, which means "attritable" remains undefined in dollars ^[6]. Watch whether the family is broken into separate solicitations by class, and whether the BQM-167A and QF-16 fleets are named as things being replaced or supplemented ^[13][14].