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 service isn’t just replacing an aging platform—it’s rewriting the economics of attrition. When a $50 million MQ-9 becomes too expensive to lose in a peer fight, the answer isn’t a better Reaper; it’s a modular, mass-producible aircraft you can afford to send into layered defenses. That shift from exquisite to attritable changes the talent map for autonomy engineers, open-architecture integrators, and program leaders who understand how to field at scale.
If you’re running ISR or autonomy programs, the Massed Modular Aircraft effort—targeting IOC in fiscal 2031 with prototypes flying within 21 months of award—is the next CCA. The Air Force is borrowing the Autonomy Government Reference Architecture and the concept refinement playbook directly from Collaborative Combat Aircraft, which means they want speed, modularity, and a mix of primes and non-traditionals. That’s a different build than the Reaper generation, and it requires leaders who’ve closed the loop on rapid prototyping, not just sustained production.
We’re already mapping candidates who’ve led attritable systems work, modular payload integration, and autonomy at the mission layer. The cleared talent pool for this isn’t deep yet, because the doctrine is still forming. If you’ve got a track record in open systems or you’ve run point on a program that accepted operational loss as a design input, now’s the time to surface.