Fighters can be refueled. Fuel is expensive. How expensive is the E3 and the crew?
"Because anything that the military makes is bound to not work at least once a year. A faulty self destruct system or accident could blow hundreds of millions of dollars and a dozen highly skilled operators out of the sky for no reason, and we'd have no way of knowing that they weren't shot down."
You misunderstand. I mean slag down the electronics so they cannot be reverse-engineered, and physically destroy (automatically) all storage media. Such a system would (if I were on the design team) require 'two keys', i.e., two different individuals would have to turn keys at different positions and then the commander hits The Big Red Button. It seems to me that this is only prudent; I would regard any design of a state-of-art surveillence plane deficient if it did not possess such a system.
" They wouldn't need to, even if they did. Once the encryption is zeroed (which takes a few seconds) , the remaining stuff is on the whole nothing you couldn't buy off the shelf (in China, for that matter). We used to help Soviet planes that landed in Alaska in trouble, and sent them on their way. We had no reason to think that China would send our plan back UPS, after tearing it apart."
I beg to disagree. As I indicate above, electronics can be reverse engineered. Intact electronics will suggest--at the very least--what electronic countermeasures they might be vulnerable to. And I have less faith than "zeroing the encryption" than you do. When the E3-A was forced down by the Chinese there were reports of the crew using fire axes(!) to try to destroy some of the equipment.
--Boris