Nothing is really new. I used to live in West Germany in the '70s and '80s. The UK had an aircraft called Harrier - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrier_jump_jet. At that time I think Sweden was deploying the Drakken (Dragon) and later the Vigen (Lightning). I made models of both as a child and I think both of them were superb in their own way.
Harrier was designed to work out of fields, let alone roads. Rather similar to an Apache. Minimal maint (ish) and so on.
I now live in Yeovil, Somerset and we have recently had several Italian rotary wing aircraft, such as The Seaking doing test flights around here. Presumably airframe testing and proving for VJ Day.
Also, the French: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEPECAT_Jaguar which was designed to be useable from improvised runways, hence the extremely robust landing gear.
My pet idea is to make some use of longwave! You know those time signals broadcast around 60 kHz? They cover thousands of kilometres from one transmitter. At 60 kHz the wavelength is 5 kilometres long and the RF tends to diffract around objects like mountains, buildings, etc. that get in the way. Longwave tends to penetrate underground, and through Faraday cages meant for short wavelengths.
Those time signals broadcast, in effect, 1 bit per second. The receiver is dead simple electronically and requires almost no energy to run. What if we broadcast a more modern error-corrected data stream? Every device could be supplied with a receive-only stream of a few hundred bits a second of whatever. I admit it's a solution somewhat in search of a problem. Weather updates? Emergency alerts?
Dim memory from my Ham Radio days that you’d need an antenna length of 1/4 the wavelength, which wouldn’t be very convenient for portable devices, unfortunately.