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 is closed, and a $50 million platform built for permissive environments doesn’t survive in contested airspace. The DIU solicitation for Massed Modular Aircraft lays out the new math: attritable, modular, mass-producible systems that can swarm, absorb losses, and still complete the mission.
If you’re leading engineering, autonomy, or program execution in this space, the requirements are worth reading closely. The Air Force wants 2,800-pound payloads, 2,300-nautical-mile combat radius, prototype flight testing within 21 months of award, and IOC — twenty mission-ready aircraft to an operational unit — by fiscal 2031. They’re applying lessons from CCA: open architecture, the Autonomy Government Reference Architecture as the software backbone, and a concept refinement phase starting first quarter of FY27. They want both primes and nontraditional firms in the mix, and they received strong responses to both the DIU solicitation and the April RFI on low-cost attritable ISR.
This isn’t just a platform replacement — it’s a shift in how the Air Force thinks about risk, cost, and operational tempo in high-threat environments. The teams that win these contracts will need depth in autonomy, modular payload integration, rapid prototyping, and production at scale. If you’re mapping your next move or building a team for a capture, this is the program to watch.