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, multiple performers, the Autonomy Government Reference Architecture—and they’re serious about nontraditional primes. The DIU solicitation closed in July; concept refinement kicks off first quarter of FY27.
We’re already mapping this market for a handful of clients. The talent gap isn’t in legacy ISR alone—it’s in leaders who can move between attritable design, open systems integration, and operational analysis at speed. If you’ve built modular payloads, led rapid prototyping programs, or stood up autonomy stacks that plug into government reference architectures, you’re exactly who the primes and emerging players need on the ground now.