A growing consensus holds that the future of airpower, and of defense technology in general, involves the interplay of crewed and uncrewed vehicles.
Such teaming means that more-numerous, less-costly, even expendable uncrewed vehicles can bring more weapons to the fight and force the adversary to deal with more targets. More-expensive and survivable crewed vehicles, meanwhile, can stand back, offering human supervision of the entire formation.
But none of that will work without maintaining real-time common operational pictures. Everyone and everything in a team needs to know what the others know—about each other and about the enemy.
One nation has longer experience in automatic sharing of data among aircraft. Thirty years ago, its interceptors could perform a radar-silent engagement by mind-melding the radars of two fighters tens of kilometres apart. Every pilot in a group of four aircraft knew the position, fuel state and remaining weapons of the other aircraft. For many years, this was one of the least reported stories in military aerospace (which was no accident).
What that nation is doing now is highly relevant to the crewed-and-uncrewed future. It isn’t the United States, Russia, France, Israel or Britain. It’s Sweden.
In a lobby on the Saab campus in Linkoping in southern Sweden, a blue-and-white mural of a spring sky covers one wall and extends across a white-framed door. Behind that door, Peter Nilsson, a former pilot of mighty JA 37 Viggen fighters, heads Saab’s low-profile future combat aircraft program.
Nilsson and his colleagues have been talking with growing confidence about plans for a Sweden-led future combat air system, now supported by contracts from Swedish procurement agency FMV. Saab chief executive Micael Johansson said in a 7 February earnings call that Saab expected to fly several uncrewed aircraft in the coming years.
Nilsson showed concepts in a Swedish TV interview in late 2024 that included a future piloted stealth fighter and a tailless stealth uncrewed aircraft with a striking resemblance to Saab’s J 35 Draken, the fighter that showed in the mid-1950s that Sweden’s aviation expertise was in the top tier.
Sweden’s knowledge of stealth today should likewise not be underrated. Saab has insisted that its current fighter, the JAS 39E/F Gripen, has a balance of reduced signature and countermeasures, though the company keeps details close. Its technology has roots in 1963 when, in a little-known deal, US Air Force stealth guru Bill Bahret traveled to Sweden and advised Saab on reducing the radar cross-section of the Viggen.
The final design for the Swedish system that’s in the works may not have been settled, but it’s leaning towards a combination of uncrewed and expendable systems, initially to extend the capabilities of the Gripen. Then a new crewed fighter would arrive in service after 2040.
In August, Saab acquired Blue Bear, a small British company specialising in the control and coordination of drone swarms. In earlier briefings, Saab has discussed putting elements of the JAS 39E/F’s electronic warfare system in a decoy based on the British Spear 3 missile.
That’s to say, pieces are being put together.
Saab’s long leadership in mission computers and datalinks demands attention to what it’s doing now. The first military aircraft with a central mission computer based on integrated circuits? The AJ 37 Viggen, first flight 1967.
Four decades later, Saab said that what was then the future Gripen (now JAS 39E/F) would have a mission computer partitioned from flight-critical systems, to make upgrading software easier and faster. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery: the architectures of the Northrop Grumman B-21 and the Rafale F4 followed Saab’s pattern.
History is in order when it comes to datalinks, too. The Swedish air force realised in the 1950s that Russian jammers about 400 kilometres from Sweden would make voice communications impossible. The J 35F Draken had a simple but robust ground-to-air datalink, and it was much more valuable if the bad guys did not know about it. Mentioning the datalink on the air was forbidden, and the datalink indicator in the cockpit was ingeniously disguised as a backup instrument. Even a friendly guest pilot would not know it was there.
The Viggen, replacing the Draken in 1979, had a four-ship link that was unrivaled until the F-22 entered service in 2005: it was far faster than NATO’s standard Link 16. Two JA 37s could use their radars in passive mode to perform a silent missile attack. The datalink made it possible to integrate the bearing and elevation from both aircraft in real time and generate a track precise enough for firing weapons.
The next-generation Gripen datalink added the ability to share fuel and weapons status and generate a common operational picture on the glass cockpit displays—20 years before a comparable capability arrived on the F-35.
Saab operations adviser Jussi Halmetoja brought the story up to date in a recent video. ‘The big transitional change now, he said, is that ‘mission data is your greatest weapon—how you collect it, how you transform it, how you datalink it.’
Halmetoja describes the operation of a four-aircraft Gripen E/F formation: ‘Each aircraft has 40 different antennas, providing spherical passive detection, and every Gripen collects terabytes of data. You share the data at high rate across the four-ship to create situational awareness.’
Significantly, when you think of extending this philosophy to unmanned vehicles, the link-dependent functions are automated. The goal is a pilot who ‘trusts the system. Don’t go and do a lot of button-pressing’—for example, to control the radar of his or her own aircraft—‘because you can mess up the data fusion. The system monitors the track quality, and if it gets really bad it can use the active radar.’ But the algorithms driving the system will decide which aircraft’s radar to use in the group.
Halmetoja adds that ‘people raise their eyebrows when I say that every track is wrong, and every coordinate is wrong. It’s one of the greatest challenges.’ On the Gripen, to get the greatest possible fidelity, ‘we do the fusion at the lowest level, on the platform.’ (An earlier paper makes the point that this also reduces volume of traffic on the datalink.)
But there are still errors, says Halmetoja, ‘and to manage that you need networked smart weapons’ such as the MBDA Meteor ramjet-powered air-to-air missile. Those weapons need datalink support, but he adds that it does not have to come from the aircraft that fired the missile.
Saab produces the Gripen’s Arexis EW system, which uses the advanced technology of phased-array gallium-nitride antennas for precise tracking, jamming and deception. The company has long taken the view that electronic warfare and reduction of radar cross section are complementary, not alternatives, and that stealth is not a panacea.
Sweden has, for now, elected not to join either the British-Japanese-Italian Global Combat Aircraft Program or the parallel Franco-German-Spanish effort called FCAS. Says Nilsson: ‘The best solution for Sweden to create national ownership is that we do the same as with Gripen. That we have many partners, but that we decide on the design ourselves.’
