GA-ASI and Tactical Air Support close a kill chain across two different companies' aircraft

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems (GA-ASI) and Tactical Air Support, Inc. announced on September 15 the results of a flight test — conducted July 21 — in which a GA-ASI Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) test aircraft and Tactical Air Support's F-5 Advanced Tiger, a manned fighter, jointly tracked and engaged airborne targets using Infrared Search and Track (IRST) Multi-Ship Ranging. Both aircraft ran GA-ASI's TacACE (Tactical Autonomy Ecosystem) software and shared data over a Beyond Line of Sight (BLOS) data link.

The notable part is not the sensor itself: IRST is a mature passive-detection technology, valued precisely because it emits no radar signal and is harder for an adversary to detect. The notable part is that two aircraft built by two competing companies coordinated a live targeting picture without bespoke, point-to-point integration between their software stacks. Both systems were built to comply with the Pentagon's Autonomy Government Reference Architecture (A-GRA) and Agile Mission Suite (AMS-GRA) — open technical standards the Department of Defense now requires of autonomy vendors bidding into the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program.

"This is the kind of operationally relevant mission that will allow autonomous CCAs to deploy alongside manned aircraft and deliver real combat capability," said Michael Roberts, GA-ASI's Advanced Programs Emerging Technology Director, framing the result as proof that competing vendors' platforms can interoperate through a shared, plug-and-play reference architecture rather than proprietary interfaces. GA-ASI brings decades of relevant flight experience to the claim: its Predator-lineage aircraft have logged more than 9 million flight hours over 30-plus years of operation.

For Cardan-AI, the story is less about one successful test than about a standardization choice with direct economic consequences for every company competing to supply autonomy software, sensors or airframes into these programs — a mechanism the theory of technology standards, developed by Farrell and Saloner in the 1980s, describes precisely. We unpack it in today's analysis.