My father taught and did some curriculum development for the Navy electronics school in the 1960s. His prior work out in the fleet was cited for its high quali

My father taught and did some curriculum development for the Navy electronics school in the 1960s. His prior work out in the fleet was cited for its high quality. His old stories of studying schematics, rebuilding radar repeaters, and performing occult rituals around wave guides seem hard to transplant to a world of synthetic apertures and DSPs. Similarly, I think cryptography tech was then just transitioning from complex piles of discrete components into things more like modern computers full of integrated circuits. As integrated circuits and software eats the world, I think there is less opportunity for a technician in the field to diagnose and correct a problem in the functional paths of such systems. There might be important field-work remaining in the power electronics and environment of the digital systems, but it isn't surprising to me that larger black boxes become the replaceable units. You replace an entire unit with something in-spec. If the software needs tuning, that is going to happen back in a lab somewhere and come out as a new revision of a system, not happen in the field like someone patching a faulty wiring harness.