[robocat]

To make it safe for the pilot plus anyone in the flight path.

Could the hours of maintenance be dropped significantly in wartime: if you don't care about catastrophic failure modes over a foreign country?

[smackeyacky]

I assume there are shortcuts like extending the service life of particular consumables and whatnot.

Even something like a Gripen, designed to be run from makeshift airfields needs 10 hours of maintenance per hour of flight. Maybe it’s just hard to build supersonic, combat capable airframes as was suggested above.