Our civilian aerospace industry had a scandal a decade or two back because apparently various African countries were buying our trainers, discovering that as shipped the trim was a little off, and rebalancing by mounting MGs in the too-light-because-it-was-empty space.
These are the "good stuff" .. for various data gathering activities you do not want a fast high flying jet, you want a slow close to ground platform travelling at sub 70 m/s speeds to maximise "dwell time" over each ground point (while not travelling so slow as to fall out of the bloody sky).
Crop dusters carry weight, excel at STOL (Short Takeoff and Landing) on "Oh shit, that's not a runway".
US Special Operations Command is into the sneaky stuff - intelligence gathering, quick in | out person on ground infil and exfiltrates.
Stubby little planes that pull like tractors and can depart flying upside down underneath a bridge are ideal, they get overshot by fighter jets and have engines too cold for air to air missiles (fingers crossed).
I'm guessing that these days there are two kinds of airborne objects: multi-modal drones and targets.
Oddly enough, heat seeking air to air came in ca.1950s, so self-flying has been around a while, and now people (especially those with heavy logistics requirements) are talking about land based self-driving, but shouldn't the seas be an intermediate problem? Where did all the self-sailing vessels go?
Our civilian aerospace industry had a scandal a decade or two back because apparently various African countries were buying our trainers, discovering that as shipped the trim was a little off, and rebalancing by mounting MGs in the too-light-because-it-was-empty space.