Yes. Fighter drones will eventually replace manned fighters. With advancements in AI, man-in-the-loop will no longer be necessary. Meaning fighter drones will be impervious to connection/communication jamming, as they will be able to function with full autonomy.
AI is already advanced enough to defeat humans in dogfights. It's only a matter of time before it dominates the skies.
Taking my mind off the ongoing conflict for a bit to air this out a bit more..... that may be of use and interest:
There is an extra advantage of there being much more robust G limit....there is lot of untapped envelope in V-n diagram even with current material + design thresholds (one can read up "divergence" in aeroelasticity for example)....because simply the pilot inside has to stay within +9/-3 G roughly (the de facto military standard).
One can visualise this to some degree with the aid of a typical VN-diagram:
Source:
https://www.aiaa.org/docs/default-s...itions/gradteam3rdplace.pdf?sfvrsn=d7888d6c_0
With the caution area becoming more available + secure in sustained realm (with the removal of the human pilot's survival factor)...even with the current crop of design and materials in this realm.
As compared to it being an instantaneous/transient realm currently with a pilot onboard.
Note mach 1 (at sea level to 15k feet) is 680 ~ 720 kts respectively.
That whole paper is actually quite well done and worth a look through/read by those here interested in the overall aircraft design conception process (before engineer teams gets involved in major way and start saying "nope + lets compromise here, here and here"*).
Also all the weight and volume that goes towards the pilot (and life + function sustenance) becomes available for other purposes....where every kg and cubic meter matters a huge deal.
This talk has all developed commensurately ever since (IMO) deep blue beat Garry convincingly...i watched that in younger years in utter horror/fascination.
The technology simply fills in behind this expanding talk + philosophical realm now more than ever. It is all fairly and increasingly rationally normalised and accepted.
For a while sensor resolution and response was quite the issue (if you look at the early digital cameras for example) compared to say an organic analog, proving an obstacle chokepoint for a decade, maybe two. But that practical resolution has been surmounted effectively and increasingly.
It is still however the main governing limitation (along with materials + physics as they portend to the larger available practical envelope) to what can be realised (and compared as trade off with the legacy human-driven system) as the other thresholds (logic, processing etc) are well ahead of it.
Where there are far greater array of multi-purpose tasks (needing dynamic ability of human response or emotional/moral EQ intuition etc)...humans will be very employed in long term....and we will keep pushing in that frontier (the AI actually enables more time + space for this a lot more).
In aerospace it would be roles in say complicated lab/science payloads or higher order decision making in general....compared to say a more narrow defined warfare fighter unit where AI can fully exercise its advantages.
i.e a trunk, branch to leaf fractal model playing to each relative strength (humans at the core where they are most optimal....and AI taking over the appropriate balance at the ends and nodes and finding the optimal equilbrium).
Suffice to say the world is going to be quite different 2050 - 2100 compared to 2000-2050.
=========================
*Something btw, that technologists+machinists+technicians (the "shop/floor" crew) also do to us engineers A LOT (for phase 3) after we pass over the phase 2 workable compromise we worked out with the conceivers/scientists/designers...
I got a pretty strongly worded rebuke on just this kind of matter from one of these folks last year. Paraphrasing:....
sorry son, theres just no way to machine these parts feasibly...you came close, but no cigar...the tooling will break halfway thru and the whole effort will be wasted.
Then you got to listen (defer to their experience and well-formed intuition) and make more compromises or workarounds.
This stuff in the end often takes contours of real-world ops "close to the scene" experience a sergeant sees/knows (and able to give respected worldly advice on) vis a vis a field officer (and the latter w.r.t a flag officer) by operating on a different perspective scale.
=========================
@Joe Shearer @Anmdt @Yasar @Gessler @Bilal Khan(Quwa) et al.
