Australia's MQ-28 Ghost Bat drone flew alongside crewed fighter jets during a recent multinational exercise in the Pacific, and the top U.S. Air Force officer in the region came away encouraged.
According to DefenseScoop, the commander of Pacific Air Forces said he was "impressed" with Australia's Ghost Bat program following the Valiant Shield exercise, where the uncrewed aircraft operated together with manned fighters.
That pairing is the whole point. The Ghost Bat belongs to a category of aircraft the U.S. and its allies call collaborative combat aircraft — relatively low-cost, uncrewed jets designed to fly with piloted fighters rather than replace them. The idea is that a human pilot can direct one or more drones to scout ahead, carry extra sensors, or absorb risk that no one wants a person taking.
Exercises like Valiant Shield are where those concepts stop being PowerPoint slides. Flying a drone next to a fighter in a large multinational drill tests whether the communications links, the tactics, and the human-machine teamwork actually hold up outside a test range.
The endorsement from a U.S. commander also matters for reasons beyond the aircraft itself. Australia's program is one of the more mature allied efforts in this space, and interest from Pacific Air Forces points toward the kind of interoperability the U.S. wants with partners in the region — allied drones and American fighters working from the same playbook.
Why it matters: if uncrewed wingmen like the Ghost Bat prove themselves in real exercises, they could reshape how the U.S. and its allies plan to fight across the vast distances of the Pacific, adding mass and reach without adding pilots in harm's way.