Probably true. It would be great to move into the UCAV era and depend on them to establish air superiority, except no one (almost certainly) has the bandwidth to remotely-control a fleet of high-performance UCAVs to their potential (don't forget jamming of control links) AND no one (even more certainly) has AI's capable of successfuly operating in combat situations nearly as well as people* in the airplane. It's bad not to have the airplanes you need for the war. It's as bad to not have everything else you need to _fly_ the airplanes during the war.
I dont think that any of these issues are more of a problem than they are for current fighter jets. They too rely heavily on computers for many of their tasks. Heck they fall like a rock without a computer "flying" them because due to all the stealth stuff, their aerodynamics plain outright suck.
They also rely heavily on remote information like GPS signals, tracking signals from ground scouts, AVACS, etc. It is the age of Net Centric Warfare, if you have heard this term before. Every unit is talking to every unit and communication is most important. A pilot wont drop his bombs unless he gets the order from headquarters and the laser marker from a scout, or some satellite tracking information and the smart bombs wont hit their target without GPS or laser guidance.
Pretty much all that is susceptible to jamming in some way at some point, yet it has not really been such a huge problem yet, has it?
UAVs will not only get smarter, they will also have support from other units in the field. If they get jammed, these units will take out the jammer (very easy since the jammer lights up like a christmas tree). Until then, it wont fall down like a rock but keep flying on autopilot, or return to base, or there is some other means of controling the thing (longer wavelengths for non realtime basic instructions, or something like that).
UAVs are the future and yes it does away with all the Top Gun romanticism of the macho- aces flying to the danger zone.... and opens that job position to a whole lot of geeks out there. That means that UAV pilots will be a dime a dozen and their salaries will be low enough for the US to maintain a corps of thousands. The UAVs will also be cheap enough to have the same number. And if the evil China really was to build thousands of (probably lame) F22 clones, then the US can take them down with ten times as many UAVs that only cost half as much to produce.
The pure numbers game would make up for any advantage manned fighters could have (and dont forget that the US would still have plenty of manned planes for supporting the UAVs)
And while every Chinese elite pilot that gets shot down by one of the drones is either dead or a POW (and therefore a loss), the US UAV pilot is home for dinner the same evening and returns to fly a new UAV the next morning making use of the lessons that he learned when he was shot down by that "slit eye" the other day (and that will give them a much harder time next time around).
Things get really interesting with long duration missions, when the human pilot gets tired and has to pee, has to poop, is hungry and thirsty...
The geek controlling the UAV simply hands over to the next guy and goes to the toilet, has a lunch and coffe in the cantina, maybe a short nap and returns fully rested and perfectly happy to duty.
So, yeah you can see where I am going. UAVs are the future!
F22s are so yesterday!
This is the main reason why I am not sad that they were cancelled.
Plus in the current wars, they are much more useful than an F22.
