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https://csbaonline.org/research/publications/americas-strategic-advantage-long-range-strike/publication

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Unmanned aircraft with autonomous landing systems will be able to land on aircraft carriers without the need for a tail structure.

A tailless, fly-ing wing design, such as the UCAS-D X-47B demonstrator, has significant ad-vantages in its lift-to-drag ratio and
internal fuel fraction compared to manned fighters of equivalent size like the F-35.143 Combined with autonomous aerial re-fueling,
these attributes would give an unmanned platform significantly greater unrefueled range and mission persistence than a manned fighter.
For example, a carrier squadron of twelve X-47B-based aircraft could sustain five orbits along an enemy’s coastline to search for
mobile targets or provide supporting electron-ic attack, or two-plus orbits five hundred miles inland, even if the carrier were
based 1,500 nm from the coast, assuming sufficient tankers were available 500 nm from the coast.
Each orbit is depicted in Figure 13 with a 200 nm-diameter circle representing the distance that an aircraft at the center of
the orbit could travel within fifteen minutes (estimated conservatively at approximately 100 nm for an aircraft cruising at 460 knots).
This metric is used to approximate the geographic rapid-response “coverage” of an aircraft persisting in the operational area. Removing the tail
structure is also critical to achieving a low-observable RCS needed to penetrate and persist in contested airspace.