[loginx]

The planning and project management aspect sounds like it's straight out of a post apocalyptic bureaucratic nightmare.

It was intended to be a strike drone, but wait, let's flip the project halfway through into an intelligence drone. You know what? f*ck it, let's flip it into a refuelling drone.

The project history is a sinuous cautionary tale of scope creep and descoping.

[zyang]

Positioning it as a tanker is a smart move. Taking on the least glamorous job helps keeping the scope down, lower expectations, provide value from day 1. It's what they should have aimed for in the first place.

[sailfast]

While you might be right, is it not also possible that they delivered some key capabilities that were unique (autonomous carrier landing!?) to reach the strike objective, realized it wouldn't meet all of them so pivoted to ISR (of which I recall there being a shortage of assets so maybe more demand with other strike programs going on in 2012?) then looked to the tanker mission after realizing there were other things that it maybe couldn't do as well as other platforms for the ISR purpose?

In startup language you might say the team "pivoted"?

I'm not saying that's what happened here as bureaucracy often causes these nightmares, but it's possible there were a lot of good intentions / approaches at play as well.

[ArPDent]

reminds me of the Bradley IFV and this sequence from the Pentagon Wars

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA