Former Marine officer, disagree here that this is the change in the modern military. What you are describing is a major weakness of that type of air support.

Fighting certainly doesn't stop because you can't get comms with the bird. You just lose that as on option to deploy.

I think what gets abstracted away when people think about military operations is that it's not a chess board back at the Pentagon. They only are accomplished by physical deployment of force. You always plan for the back up contingencies because the mission still needs to get done if all the systems aren't online.

Long hard experience has taught us the way you make operations resilient is always know how to fall back on a physical signal like popping a smoke or sending up a flare.

--Perhaps that take is a bit too simplistic, so take it with a grain of salt from a ground combat element guy. I get it that there a large portions of the military who don't show up to play when their widgets stop working.