It seems like you are not well versed in ai. There was a debate about whether "hand engineering" vs "dumb simple algo's" would get results. Dumb algo's won. Your mentioning of MTI and STAP, and how difficult radar design is etc. etc., makes me think you aero guys are still in hand-engineering land.
I will offer another example. Why did the aerospace dudes not be able to autonomously fly a helicopter. in 2004, andrew ng decided to tackle this. He completely ignored any previous work, just using a dumb algo (reinforcement learning) and laptop managed to get amazing autonomous performance out it. Why was it him (ai researcher), and not people from the field of flying.
I will offer another example. Why did the aerospace dudes not be able to autonomously fly a helicopter. in 2004, andrew ng decided to tackle this. He completely ignored any previous work, just using a dumb algo (reinforcement learning) and laptop managed to get amazing autonomous performance out it. Why was it him (ai researcher), and not people from the field of flying.