F-35 Delays Mean US Marines Are Pulling Old F-18s Out of Desert Storage

I think the biggest issue is the size and power requirements of modern radars. You can't make tiny drones if none of them has a radar, so you need at least some of them to be big. If it's big and has a power hungry radar, then it also needs a big powerplant. The big powerplant drinks a lot of fuel to get any range etc. etc. If a small craft could be self reliant, then we would already be building homing missiles that provide their own radar. We don't because it makes them too big, slow, heavy and expensive! A BVR missile like the AIM-120 relies on the Radar of the firing aircraft for finding the target.

So the drones will have to be launched from carrying aircraft. We'll definitely see groups of planes very soon where some are manned, and they may be simpler and cheaper than the manned equivalent, and another category of drone that is actually launched from the carrying aircraft to rely on its range. This will limit the number of big expensive planes needed, but in reality what they did then was replace cruise missiles and standoff bombs with drones, not the launching planes.

> The US might get a full life out of the F-35, but I doubt they'll build its successor.

I also doubt they will ever make a "joint" effort again. We'll continue to see large and expensive planes though, so long as radars are massively powerful and we haven't invented backpack size Megawatt-hour batteries or tiny fusion reactors.

The MQ-9 is 11x20m and has a flyaway cost comparable to some previous gen fighters, so while it's certainly a "drone" (I hate that term), it goes all the way there and all the way home, and is much too expensive to be an expendable target or part of a "swarm". You can't make a drone that you can field dozens of to provide "security in numbers", and afford to lose a couple of. If "swarm radar" (see my last paragraph) is a possibility that lets small aircraft with small radars cooperate like a large aircraft with a large radar, then it's certainly a possibility that we can se "swarms" of > That they're substantially more expensive or slower than a use-once cruise missile doesn't matter, because the comparison is to a manned aircraft.

Whether their speed matters depends on what you want to do with them. It wouldn't be money well spent to use loiter-type surveillance craft as fighters. You could build unmanned craft that are fast enough to attack fighters, but it's a numbers game - once they get big enough to have speed and range, they are already very expensive and then you may need them to have high survivability which adds even more cost etc. If you make a "fighter drone" it will likely end up looking like an unmanned fighter plane (Unless: advances in radar tech or power generation). You might save some money because it's unmanned so it doesn't need cockpit, oxygen system, and is slightly more expendable, but you still can't afford to lose a lot of them.

I obviously have no idea apart from what I read on gossip sites, but I believe there will also be be common with a "companion" type unmanned aircraft that are built for forward reconnaissance and attack together with "big" fighters and bombers. They must be fast and stealthy and able to operate within heavily contested airspace. They will simply take over where the expensive large plane (manned or not) can't go any longer. When you think about it, the MBDA meteor and other air-breathing long range missiles are already a kind of fast autonomous planes that are launched from other planes. The line between "missile" and "plane" will blur even more.

Quoting the US Air Forces chief scientist Mica Endsley:

"We see unmanned vehicles being used for a much wider variety of missions. Today they are primarily used for ISR, long duration missions where we want to collect information. In the future, they will be moving cargo and more manned-unmanned teaming where they are acting as extensions of a manned aircraft."

> what's ruling out aperture synthesis approaches? They don't need a single big radar if they can collectively act as one...

That's a good point, I don't know what the state of the art is in "swarm radar". How much better does a pair of current fighters compare to one current fighter?

If we are going to settle for less than the F-22, then we should just buy the stealth-upgraded F-15. It's cheaper than the F-35.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_F-15SE_Silent_Eagle