An old proverb says you should not put all your eggs in one basket. That is a particularly good maxim for matters military. America’s armed forces, for example, use modified Boeing jumbo jets, called jstars, as airborne control centres for surveillance and operations. These planes are packed with sensors and their job is to orchestrate combat by detecting targets, tracking them and then assigning them to others to deal with. They have done this well for decades. But times change. With its big electronic signature, a jstars aircraft now amounts to “a sluggish flying bull’s eye”, according to Will Roper, the American air force’s head of acquisitions.
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