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jandrewrogers parent
In many regards, the F-35 was the first aircraft explicitly engineered for the requirements of drone-centric warfare. Its limitations are that this capability was grafted onto an older (by US standards) 5th generation tech stack that wasn't designed for this role from first principles. I think this is what ultimately limited production of the F-22, which is not upgradeable even to the standard of the F-35 for drone-centric environments.

The new 6th generation platforms being rolled out (B-21, F-47, et al) are all pure first-principles drone-warfare native platforms.

jasonwatkinspdx
This is simply not what happened historically.

Drones were not discussed much when the requirements for the F-35 were formed.

The F-22 was considered very open and upgradable for it's era. It's just that freakin' old where FireWire was the unproven new hotness.

Current AF efforts do focus on drone and loyal wingman concepts, but these don't have much material impact on avionics. There everything the AF is talking about is agility in deliverin capabilities through open systems architecture. That's why they're doing things like trying out k8s on military aircraft. It's not about drones specifically but things like delivering new EW capabilities in days or hours instead of decades.

For a dive on the latter stuff look into what Dr Will Roper was talking about during his tenure.

jandrewrogers OP
The F-35 is old enough that this is probably true originally but it had plenty of native capability built-in that could be applied to that domain.

Operating in a drone threat environment, which is what I was talking about primarily, is mostly unrelated to loyal wingman and related technologies.

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