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 production line shut down last year, losses mounted, and the service now wants something cheaper, modular, and attritable. They’re not looking for another exquisite platform; they’re looking for mass.
The Massed Modular Aircraft effort, run through DIU, sets a 21-month prototype timeline and a fiscal 2031 IOC with 20 mission-ready aircraft delivered. That’s fast. The requirements — 2,800-pound payload, 2,300-nautical-mile combat radius, open architecture, autonomy from day one — point to a different kind of program office and a different kind of leader. If you’ve spent a career optimizing legacy ISR platforms, this isn’t your lane. If you’ve built attritable systems, stood up software-defined payloads, or run prototype-to-production programs that actually hit schedule, you’re exactly who they need.
The Air Force is borrowing heavily from Collaborative Combat Aircraft: concept refinement phase, multiple performers, competition through prototyping, and the Autonomy Government Reference Architecture as the software backbone. They want traditional primes and nontraditional firms at the table, which means program leaders who can manage a mixed vendor base and move at DIU speed. We’re already mapping that talent — PMs who’ve run rapid prototyping efforts, autonomy leads with software-first backgrounds, and acquisition executives who understand what “loss tolerant” actually means operationally. The Reaper’s been the workhorse for two decades, but the next chapter belongs to people who can build for attrition and still deliver persistence.