Mr Walker found the deaths had been "entirely avoidable" and blamed a series of "glaring failures" that led the plane to be labelled as a hostile missile.
Not only had it decided to kill an electronic eavesdropping plane it was developing with the Navy to home in on hostile emitters, but it also moved to terminate both of its next-generation air defense systems because threats had not evolved as expected, and drastically scaled back one version of a joint radio crucial to battlefield connectivity.
That edge is the main reason why no U.S. soldier has been killed by hostile aircraft since the Korean War, and no U.S. pilot has been downed by an enemy plane since the Vietnam War.