How the U.S. and Its Allies Got Stuck with the World’s Worst New Warplane

Presumably most of these were F-4 pilots? I thought one of the most salient points of a drone is that it doesn't have a pilot?

Fighters, as a delivery/sensor platform need to be manoeuvrable to not get hit. It's economics - people are expensive to train, sensors are expensive, and so you need an expensive system that you can reuse to ensure a good ROI.

Couple this with the increasing effectiveness of ground based missile defences and it's questionable whether you can plausibly hope to penetrate an airspace defended with a next generation, automated, system anyway. Whether investing that sort of money in the aircraft is going to give you something survivable. I don't believe it's ever been tried against a current gen system, and I'm aware that operating in areas with previous-generation air-defence systems has been incredibly risky already.

However. -chews her lip- If you don't have a lot of money sunk into your delivery platform - and if your sensors are out of harms way - then the survivability of the remaining components of the system, the bit that just has to get your missile, or whatever, into the area becomes a non-issue.

To an extent the original cruise missiles were the answer to just that question with respect to the Soviet Union: How do you penetrate a well defended airspace without losing an unacceptably high investment?

Consequently, I wonder whether air dominance, in the mid to long term, is going to be increasingly determined by the quality of your missiles. By extremely long range missile systems interacting with very powerful, networked, sensors (that might be, for example, based on drones far beyond the active area.)

Under that sort of interpretation, you won't have a fighter. At its logical extreme, you'll have a cruise missile that can go to the operational area in a reasonable timeframe and has a very fast second or third stage to do the final closing with the target. You can make your cruise missile go faster than any fighter could, because the airframe is a throw away, and because you don't have to hold any fuel back to get back to base, and because it will be vastly lighter, and because you don't have to worry about any squishy human riding in it.

That seems, to me, like the logical extension of the see first shoot first doctrine that the F-22 and 35 were based upon, the logical extension of drones as a low-cost delivery method, and the logical extension of the need to penetrate increasingly well defended airspaces.

If that is how things go, the quality of the aircraft you have becomes largely irrelevant. They'd never get close enough to the action to need great performance.

/libertarian

You'd look for the larger drones that never pull turns over 8.5g.

Of course, even if "ditch it in a convenient large body of water" was a suitable substitute for vertical/short landing capability for carrier-based aviation, it wouldn't provide the same benefits for, e.g., improvised land-based airfields.

So, this would be less capable -- and probably more expensive -- than just building a VSTOL aircraft to start with.