Fleet Shadowers become early-warning aircraft

The Fleet Shadower concept already combines endurance, observers, radios, and prospective air-to-surface-vessel radar. Those features make the aircraft more than a night reconnaissance machine: it can coordinate a fleet, search for submarines, and report contacts from well beyond the horizon. Large exercises could reveal those secondary uses even without combat forcing an immediate solution. Incremental development might therefore produce a naval airborne-early-warning or AWACS-like capability by the 1950s. An apparently eccentric prewar design finds a new role through sensors and doctrine.