The Air Force’s hunt for a Reaper successor tells you everything about where cleared talent needs to focus in the next three years. The MQ-9A performed well in Operation Epic Fury—the Chief of Staff called it the MVP—but the service lost airframes, the production line shut down last year, and the cost per aircraft can hit $50 million depending on sensors. That’s not sustainable in a high-attrition fight, so the Air Force partnered with DIU on the Massed Modular Aircraft effort: attritable, mass-producible platforms with open architecture, modular payloads, and a target IOC of fiscal 2031.
If you’re running engineering, autonomy, or program leadership in the ISR or unmanned space, this is your lane. The service wants something that can self-deploy 8,000 nautical miles, carry 2,800 pounds, and reach prototype flight test within 21 months of award. They’re applying lessons from CCA—concept refinement phase kicks off first quarter of FY27, multiple performers, and they’re using the Autonomy Government Reference Architecture so mission software can be swapped at speed. Both traditional primes and nontraditional firms responded to the DIU solicitation, which closed in July, and the Air Force published a parallel RFI in April that drew heavy interest.
The talent implication is straightforward: if you’ve built or led programs in modular aircraft design, open systems, autonomy software, or attritable platforms, you’re about to be in very high demand. The Air Force is designing for mass and acceptable loss from the start, not retrofitting legacy systems. That’s a different engineering and acquisition culture, and the teams that staff up now—especially those who can work across the CCA and MMA portfolios—will own the next decade of unmanned ISR. We’re already mapping that market.