I think you are ignoring the direction of COTS technology. For many
years there has been a software suite PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine).
This effectively binds together a number of processors together and
runs a single program.

In Java you program in threads. Each thread can be run independently.
The PVM system has the task of deciding which machine should run the
thread. Witth UAVs what you do is this - You have a number of processes
associated with actually flying the airplane, preprocessing of the
sensor suite and firing of the machine gun which are confined to a
specific processor - the local on board processor, and other threads
concerned with the deeper stategy that will run on any processor. PVM
decides which processor to use on the basis of how occupied the
processors are and the rate of data transmission possible. The
programmer does not have to know the details of how resources are
allocated.

You hould really not be thinking about knowledge of aircraft position
to each other, you should be thinking about a Java program and threads.
In Javas I can say

class aircraft{
double xpos,ypos,zpos;//Positions.
double vx,vy,vz;//Velocities;
......
};

I can say in my main module.


int nfriend,nhostile;//Number of aircraft
aircraft *friend, *hostile;

The threads will constantly be updating this. You will have a thread
called "dogfight" which will work out strategy.

The prograamer need not know how the data is transmitted. The software
to do this is around.